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An excellent essay on a topic that I find very interesting. You mention TOR, but there are problems with TOR. Probably the most difficult problem is that the exit node, where the onion routing ends and the node communicates with a particular server that is generating actual content, has a lot of information. Any exit node has access to all the information sent to it by unsecured applications. So, if the web site you are accessing is not using Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security, the information being passed to that site, such as log-in information, would be compromised to whoever is operating the exit node. It turns out that there are good reasons to think that some big players, including possibly intelligence agencies of various governments, are operating exit nodes and gathering data. Beyond exit node eavesdropping, there are quite a few other identifiable weaknesses to TOR, such as Autonomous System eavesdropping, traffic-analysis attack, TOR exit node block, bad apple attack, IP address leak through the use of certain TOR protocols, a sniper attack, and a weakness associated with the Heartbleed bug.

Among other concerns that come to mind, TOR is endorsed as the best possible methodology for Internet privacy by the USA’s National Security Agency. And as Edward Snowden has proved, those people cannot be trusted.

Another approach would be to use a Virtual Privacy Network. I happen to like both the ethics and business practices of the people at Cryptohippie.com, but there are many VPN providers to choose from in the world. A VPN provides encrypted tunnelling of all activity, so there isn’t the same difficulty with exit nodes.

You are correct, I think, in concluding that care is necessary when using Bitcoin to assure any kind of economic privacy. For a great many reasons, I think the Voucher-Safe platform on which SilentVault is built represents a better set of ideas for anonymous person-to-person payments. Here is an article from our technical lead discussing some of the technical issues leading to greater privacy from our approach. https://silentvault.com/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=2

Thanks for the link to this. I am going to email the staff at Bitcoin Magazine and suggest a publication.

Bitcoin also essential if your purchasing VPN Service for you online protection. which makes your connection 100% anonymous while surfing.

Gmail? Really? Expatriate your mail too for heaven’s sake! 🙂
Best of luck with your project!

🙂 gmail is easy. Any suggestions?

@juangalt Sure. Tutanota — free, seamless encryption, no US nexus.
More choices here:
https://bananas.liberty.me/youre-a-criminal-in-a-mass-surveillance-world-how-to-not-get-caught/

Right. I got tutanota, that’s for the top secret hot stuff. 😀 and biz. You are right, that would not have made much of a difference in ease of use.

Except that with tuta, if other party does not have encryption, then, there’s not much difference. If they use gmail, yahoo or w,e then its still logged and plaintext to the corps and the spooks.

Email seems to be one of the hardest things to do end to end encrypted while having compatible encryption with other platforms.

(Saw your article / book. Loved it. 🙂 )

Thanks! You’re of course right about the encryption, but you might as well lead by example. Plus anybody who already gets what’s at stake may be turned off about sending messages to G(ov)mail accounts.

Well, I can’t argue with that. 🙂

For those paying attention to this, and wanting optimal privacy, you can contact me at [email protected] a Tutanota email

Well that was ridiculously beautiful. Damn!

That pictures is seriously perfect for this article. I am glad I read it! A myriad of ideas I never once considered, and theories that make crazy sense. Thank you for sharing it!

Omg!! I’m so exited that you liked it! Thank you for commenting. 🙂

It’s awesome to see that you have been motivated by Stefan! I could tell! I heard echoes of his uncalled for accent, rattling on about getting rid of bad people, to not waste your time, lol!

But you are welcome! I more than liked it though. It made me feel like you have been bottling up a ton of creative concepts, it was awesome to see them poured out so quickly!

Do you live in Toronto??

haha thank you! maybe spreading it out more would have been better? it definitely was like a burst of creativity. I had the insight for this post like 3 weeks before and just had to get it out of me.

yes, Toronto. you?

Libertarians of many stripes have been predicting the US collapse for decades – at least back to the ’70’s. There are many awful things going on today, with the huge increase of government overreach, Obamacare, gigantic Fed debt, and so much more. I don’t want to minimize that. However, on the other hand, we’re far wealthier than we were in the ’70’s when there was gigantic stagflation, price controls, the Vietnam war, huge crime, massive racial and sexual orientation discrimination, 13%+ prime interest rates, stock market at 800…for 10+ years the economy was in the toilet and society was a mess.

But when Volcker stopped inflation, Reagan freed up the economy a bit, and other changes were put into place, we had massive growth – and so, so many things have changed for the better. (I’m sorry, I have to go to work so I don’t have time to go into all the details!)

My point – I think we have still have enough freedom and an amazingly open culture that churns ideas and facts through it so fast, with a population willing to change what it’s doing fairly quickly, that its destruction is a lot less likely than the doomsayers have been predicting for years. Huge changes in technology keep the authoritarians at bay – they’re never as smart as the people inventing it.

As Tom Wolfe says “Fascism is always coming to the United States…and landing in Europe.”