have now got an interesting and potentially valuable set of ideas about projects to both foster the bringing of cipherpunk type folk related to the Tor network, and creating the possibility of using Steem in a Hostile Environment^TM.

Thanks to @voluntary, my old highschool buddy, who asked me 'so, maybe you could offer a service like Anonsteem,' and as I read this off my smartphone's screen, the little gremlins in my brain started ticking over and thinking about other ideas as well.

So, my most immediate plans are as follows:

1. Anonymous Steem Account Service

Set up a webserver (only) connected to the hidden service, and write a simple web application that allows a user to pay either Steem or Bitcoin, and for their money they get a shiny new Steem account mined by me, and I will charge maybe 5% on top for this service.

I am sure this is a somewhat complicated business. I have to be running the Bitcoin CLI wallet, and probably people won't want to pay with Steem. For that the next idea comes up, and this one gives me a way to do it also.

I also don't know exactly what the security procedures are with this, like, when mining an account, can you just give it the public key you want it to have, this way I just need to write a small python script that potential users can use that generates a public key from their secret, they put this public key into anonsteem, set up a buy, then I give them a BTC and Steem address to pay, and I can't know their secret and I don't create the account until that payment is in.

Also how do I notify them if the process is not immediate, when their account has been created? I figured for that, Bitmessage. So another thing to add to the collection of apps on the server - a headless Bitmessage for doing scripted message sending.

So, it's not a small project, but I think I could make money out of it, as well as doing some advocacy for the benefits of location obfuscation security.

...which leads to:

2. Steem Payment Tumbler

With the aforementioned project, one of the first things I can learn how to do is create new accounts. So I could make a little farm of accounts, maybe 10 or so, and use them to implement a payment tumbler. Again, I take a little chunk, say 1% transaction fee, and their payment, like a Tor circuit, cannot be easily tracked to the origin, the more users using it, the more effective it can be.

Obviously, having a tumbler for Steem would be essential to accepting Steem payments anonymously, and it would confound the snoopy snoops who think that people with lots of money in Steem are accountable to the random shmoes that the rest of us are here.

3. Tor Gateway to steemit.com

This one I thought would be simple. I tried simply setting up a hidden service that connects on to steemit.com's IP address on port 443, but that didn't work. So I will have to do a little reading on how to negotiate the SSL stuff to get that working. It may take some kind of lightweight proxy to translate the addresses when funny 3 number code HTTP messages arrive, like 304, redirect, or so.

Or maybe it would be simpler to put piston-web on my webserver reachable through Tor. I believe that piston-web has reasonable security for keeping your secret keys secret from me also. Whatever is required I will find out, and make it happen.

Anonymise All the Connections!

Being that I have more extensive experience, dating back to the inception of Tor, on working with it, it seems like a natural thing for me to set up the three projects above.

Since it is one of the selling points of Steem, that it is censorship resistant, it should therefore also be resistant to tracing the sources of information where hostile agencies might try to harm the people reporting such information.

It's not really anonymity, it's pseudonymity. But you can't get any kind of credibility when your information comes out of the blue, and may have some benefit if a source can continue to report from the same pseudonym, and then the information can become more credible. Of course people doing such things do have to be careful to not build too much of a reputation and thereby become a target or leave traces in their posts that lead back to them.

That's not really my business, but this is the reason for setting up these Tor things, and also the payment tumbler. Every way to find a user should have a nice foggy Tor cloud between the adversary and the users. Both the connection to either steemit.com, or RPC endpoints, and the links between transfers of funds between accounts, are all avenues of identifying the human behind an account.

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

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