In the eternal fight against repressive governments, draconian laws, evil bankers and greedy corporations - crypto often uses anonymity as a defence

The mere fact that crypto transactions and wallet owners are generally anonymous is one of the greatest benefits of crypto and one of the major factors on which its success is based. While the threatened entities try to demonise crypto with allegations like "it is used to buy illegal goods on the dark web"; this is largely just self-serving propaganda and is always only a negatively biased attack focussed on one of crypto's few weak points.

Crypto Privacy: Email addresses and correspondence

The inherent security through anonymity through crypto has already been proven is a very public and significant way.

As the original crypto, Bitcoin is old and based on old technology and capabilities compared to some more modern cryptos. Yes, I understand it has been upgraded (always tricky to do with BTC due to the many viewpoints on what the next upgrade should look like), but it is still very much "old technology" in crypto terms.

Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) created Bitcoin almost 10 years ago and mined the first million coins (roughly speaking). The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has been the subject of much speculation over the years. Some people/organisations have very good reasons for wanting to find Satoshi Nakamoto (probably starting with his local tax collector!), yet the outdated technology of Bitcoin has kept that identity safe for almost a decade so far. That is remarkable when you consider that Bitcoin is the oldest and one of the least advanced cryptocurrencies in existance. Not only that, it isn't even a privacy coin! (such as Monero, ZCash, PIVX etc). I would be very surprised if large government organisations had not made serious attempts to identify this individual (or group of persons), yet as far as we know, they have not been successful in doing so yet.

The weak link

By giving in to regulations, many cryptos and crypto related institutions require you to provide KYC data (Know Your Customer). This includes things like your real name, email address, country of residence etc. Sometimes this is used for the purposes of e.g. account recovery - like for an exchange - useful if you lose your password. But overall I consider KYC requirements to be a bad thing. You should be able to carry out crypto transactions without ever having to reveal your identity.

The solution

Cryptos like THEKEY and Civic will hold your personal data to themselves and then act as a third party to verify you when other sites or services require it. This is a great idea and one which I intend to make use of; but not once have I yet had the opportunity to do so. I have yet to find a compliant site where I can use such a service. instead, they all still ask for my full details when I want to KYC. And so today I am writing this to help you a little bit in this regard.

More issues

Email addresses are an issue. You either pay for them after registering with a centralised service e.g. your ISP or phone company, or you get a free one through the likes of Google (Gmail), Yahoo! etc. The former are centralised entities which comply with national regulations and they already have your data - they are thus inherently compromised. The latter are susceptible to hacking - ask me, I've been there (I terminated an account on one of the major services for that very reason). In fact: if you have been a member of any of these online sites/services at the right (or perhaps wrong) time, then your information may already have been compromised and published for all to see: https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites

In case you are too busy (which is a nice way of me calling you "lazy") to go through their list; let me highlight a few of the services which have been compromised according to that site:

• Adobe - 152 million accounts compromised in 2013
• Adult Friend Finder - 3 million accounts compromised in 2015
• Ashley Madison - 30 million accounts compromised in 2015
• Avast (anti-virus) - 422 thousand accounts compromised in 2015
• Bitcoin talk (the forum) - 500 thousand accounts compromised in 2015 with usernames, email and IP addresses, genders, birth dates, security questions and password hashes being exposed
• BitTorrent - 34 thousand accounts compromised in 2016

That's just a few cherry picked examples from the first two letters of the alphabet! See the extent of the problem? But the list goes on a looong way. Including:

• Creative
• disqus
• Domino's (pizza)
• Dropbox
• Ethereum (forum)
• Evony
• Forbes (website)
• imgur
• Kickstarter
• League of Legends
• LinkedIn
• Malwarebytes
• MySpace
• Patreon
• Qatar National Bank
• Snapchat
• Sony
• tumblr
• uTorrent
• xHamster
• Yahoo!
• Zoosk

and many MANY more. So no matter what you sign up with online, your details may be published in the open. Some of these breaches are only discovered several years after the breach!. I can testify that this was the case with me.

A gap filler

What if you could have a secure email address? One which encrypted the email data between accounts using the same service? One designed to be the starting block of a secure internet? A free service (or paid if you want more features) with 99.95% uptime guaranteed by their SLA.

Such a thing exists. Protonmail https://protonmail.com features all of those things on a fully functional browser-based email system. You can also download the app for your phone. Protonmail is so secure that even they can't break the encryption of your mail sent to someone else, even if someone tried to compel them to (as has been done recently with large tech companies).

From https://protonmail.com

You can also send emails which self-destruct after a certain time. A fantastic feature is that you can even send encrypted mails to the likes of Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL or Outlook and others by sending them a link to an encrypted mail online. They then need only a passphrase which you supply them in order to decrypt it in their own browser.

If you use Protonmail you need to send them a phone number to verify the account you set up, but that number remains anonymous. The important thing is that you can have a totally anonymous email account with high security. Safe from hackers, governments and corporations. Ideal for a crypto enthusiast! I have only recently started using the service, so I can't comment on how well it works or how reliable and good it is. I just want you all to know that it is available and that I think it is a very good idea for crypto fans to make use of services like this. Until such a time as that services like Civic and THEKEY are widely accepted, services like Protonmail remain our best bet.

I hope that helps you and that we can all look forward to an anonymous and secure crypto future together. Remember: you can never be too careful with crypto. Someone is always trying to steal your funds by whatever means available!

Yours in secure crypto,
Bit Brain (definitely not Satoshi Nakamoto)

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Published on

by Bit Brain

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