What are the options for increased privacy in how you pay for things where you live?
Cash is the obvious answer, but what about buying stuff online?
UK here. Thinking of ditching cards/contactless for good old cash. No idea about online payments - not doing anything illegal so might persevere with cards for now. Zero experience with crypto.
Cash and Monero. I nearly never pay for things by card these days; it’s entirely possible.
How would a total noob get started with monero? I take it I need some kind of wallet and somewhere to buy it?
It isn’t as hard as people imagine it to be. For starters you could watch a few entertaining videos by MentalOutlaw or listen to Opt Out and Watchman Privacy podcast.
When you feel more at home with the terminology and understand the basic process behind cryptocurrencies in general and Monero, you could get a wallet, look some at some of their recommended guides, buy some Bitcoin at a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange, trade it for Monero and badabim badaboom - you now have Monero.
I recommend either Haveno Reto or Bisq. Nevertheless, always do your own research and make your own choice. This is a good place to start.
You can use centralized exchanges as well as they make the process a bit easier but then you have to KYC yourself. Which isn’t a big problem because when you trade Bitcoin to Monero, all following transactions are anonymous.
If you want to go hardcore from the start, you could use decentralized P2P exchange to get Monero for cash but this is a bit more advanced and comes with a premium.
I got the same question🙌 i need someone to walk me thru it.
Monero
GNU Taler is an anonymous digital cash, but it’s not yet widely adopted, I think only a few banks in Switzerland are using it. Hopefully if continues to gain momentum.
I have questions. I’ve known about taker for a long while now and always thought it would get nowhere not because its bad, but because people likely don’t care. However since the steam adult games sensorship, I seen it mentioned in Lemmy like 6 times. Even before crypto.
Has something changed? And I missing something? Do they have some actual big users? Do people now care? Or is allt his just a Lemmy bubble kind of thing?
Since Taler isn’t operating in the same way as the wild-west of crypto, and needs to secure the adoption of existing banking institutions, its rollout is going to be much slower.
It hasn’t been widely adopted yet, but the big change that occured is it only just recently released a stable 1.0 version that makes wider adoption possible, and passed some essential security audits, including for iOS.
In addition to recently being approved and available in Switzerland, it is also planned to be added to a Ko-fi-like payment/donation system thanks to a grant by the NLnet foundation, which will hopefully enable it to gain wider adoption by creators or youtubers, as an example. In the future, it could become a replacement for Zelle if more banks adopt it (I suspect credit unions would be more likely to give it a try, if they became aware of it by their membership, and it was requested a lot).
There’s a bit more discussion of it over at !money@slrpnk.net, if you’re interested.
It likely does have more representation and mind-share here on lemmy since it aligns with the ideals of many users here in particular, we’re going to be more tuned into alternatives like that compared to the wider population.
I don’t see anything at !money@slrpnk.net
It likely wasn’t federated to lemmy.zip. Try subscribing to it and then reloading it a few times. Otherwise you can go to it directly from https://slrpnk.net/c/money to see what should be showing up once it’s federated.
Thanks
I use prepaid cards for Twitch and similar online services. It’s great because they always try to dark-pattern you into subscriptions, but then they’re all plaintive when your account runs out and they don’t have a credit card to perpetually drain. (actually, it’s more like “stages of grief”… first it’s alarmist: “your payment has failed!!!” then it’s businesslike: “remember to re-subscribe!” THEN it’s plaintive: “(name of performer) misses you on Our Moneydraining Platform!” then it’s nostalgic: “remember the good times you had on Our Moneydraining Platform? It’s not too late to re-subscribe!”) However, there’s usually a slight extra charge for the cards.
Cash irl is great but a slight downside is making sure you’re always carrying enough. Also, if you drop it somewhere it’s just gone.
Cash is pretty accessible where I live, but I’m always in for a surprise when I gravitate towards self-checkout and realize that it’s a card-only machine.
Prepaid cards used to be my go-to online, but it seems that fewer and fewer payment processors are letting them through their “security” checks. They were also next to impossible to obtain when I was in Europe. For a lack of better options on hand, I went with privacy.com’s virtual cards, which doesn’t really anonymize things in the eyes of MasterCard, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.
The only other thing I could think of is signing up for eBay or Amazon with a pseudonym, paying with gift cards purchased at a store with cash, and shipping to a PO box or Amazon pick-up location.
Ideally Monero, but it’s not as straightforward to obtain and there’s a very limited selection of vendors that accept it.
Cash isn’t private due to banknote serial scanning. Now we need a remixing service for physical cash.
For cryptocurrencies, look at Monero.
Where I live I can get cash at the supermarket. They scan my card and handle cash right from the cash box, I’ve never seen them scanning the money before they give it out. I think cash is still the best option for private payment in day to day life scenarios.
You really thing they can do targeted tracking with banknote serial numbers? This is paranoia my friend :D
https://netzpolitik.org/2025/bargeld-tracking-du-hast-ueberwachungsinstrumente-im-portemonnaie/ Sorry for german. But apparently baknote serial number tracking is a thing. High profile threat level but doable.
I am saying that cash payments are not significantly more private than bank card payments. What you do with that information is up to you.
They are. when I pay using a bank card many informations are shared with “partners”. With cash I don’t have to give my name to anyone.
You pull money from an ATM which scans the serials and associates them with you. You spend that bill at a shop which brings them to the bank at the end of the day where the serial is collected. So there is the information that you visited a particular shop at a particular day and bought something there.
This can be crosscorrelated with information from a dozen other sources. That infomation will practically never be used to you advantage.
You spend that bill at a shop which brings them to the bank at the end of the day where the serial is collected.
Have you ever been on a cash based society, banknotes don’t do bank - user - seller - bank route, sometimes it might happen okay but it’s not the norm, these are global, not precise tracking.
This can be crosscorrelated with information from a dozen other sources. That infomation will practically never be used to you advantage.
I agree on this, but cash have still stronger anonymity and privacy than most electronic payment methods. That’s why they want cash to disapear in favor of CBDCs and banking cards. That’s also why corrupted european deputee have big bas of cash at home lol.
That assumes that notes spent at a store are kept and never reused; that’s simply not true. If you buy a €5 coffee with a €5 note and then later in the day someone buys a €3 muffin with a €10 note, your €5 note is given to them as change. Repeat that process in a town or city and that cash gets pretty shuffled quite quickly.
Your scenario doesn’t also take into account till “float” where a portion of cash is kept in the till/store/elsewhere to seed the till the next morning for the first customers of the day, should they need change for their purchases.
easy, go at an ATM, get 20$ bills, and then ask people (friends, cashier etc) to change it for smaller or larger bills
Coincards allows you to buy gift cards with crypto.
Prepaid credit card? Although I’m not sure to which extent it’s really private. Usually the type of ‘voucher’-like payment options are kinda sketchy.
I think you’re pretty much limited to the kind of options the seller accepts and they are usually not the type of options to value privacy.
privacy com
I use it to put transaction dollar limits on my subscriptions, satellite radio in particular, so they can’t jack up my rates automatically.
I don’t put much stock in privacy.com being truly private, but it does break the data chain of using the same card for everything. I wish my credit union offered virtual cards.
I believe it only protects your privacy from the merchant (which only works of you dont need the item shipped and can put in a fake address)
I also only use it for subscriptions and sketchy looking sites.
not available in many countries
Ahh, crap
Who can use Privacy and do you need a bank account?
Privacy is currently available to US citizens or legal residents with a checking account at a US bank or credit union, and who are 18+ years of age.
IME crypto is largely useless as a means of payment, not just in the real world but also online. Literally nothing I have ever bought online could be paid with crypto, no stores that sell useful tangible things takes them, be it hardware (kitchen, computer, whatever…), groceries, things for hobby projects. There’s just nowhere to spend it.
I pay for my VPN with Monero, I pay my mobile carrier (VoIP + data eSIM) with Monero, and the last time I travelled internationally I also got a data eSIM for that with Monero. Every so often I need to get through a Google “give us a phone number” prompt, and the one-time SMS OTP service I use is also paid with Monero. There’s also stores where you can buy gift cards for real-world things (Amazon etc.) with Monero.
There’s also stores where you can buy gift cards for real-world things (Amazon etc.) with Monero.
I guess that’s highly location dependant, we don’t have amazon in my country. Even if we did I’d rather use my credit card than shop with them though…
That’s fair, if Amazon gets your real name and address anyways, the privacy protection of paying with Monero isn’t as big of a deal.
which VoIP do you use? as for the one time sms, is it smspool?
Yep, smspool. For VoIP it’s JMP.Chat locally, and. silent.link when I travel (data only).
We had different experience I guess. I have bought both online services and physical goods using Monero and Bitcoin such as VPS, email, aliases, art, PC components, bedsheets, food, drinks, clothes
VPS, email and aliases have no use in real daily life outside of small niche hobbies and is a poor indicator of how useful cryptonis as currency.
I’m intrigued about PC hardware, bedsheets, food and drink directly with crypto from a store, because I have never seen that.
VPS and email are highly used in professionnal environment not only in hobbies. There is also AI where you can pay per tokens but I don’t really use that. I have even found a local phone carrier that have added Lightning Network and Bitcoin onchain for payment recently.
I live in a country where the currency holds strong even against US petrodollar. Where bank transfers have no additionnal cost (with the exception of international ones) and where cash is still used, so yes here bitcoin is considered more a store of value investment, despite mutiple merchants accepting it as a medium of exchanges. And crypto is more on the gambling side anyways.
However in countries like Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, India, Venezuela, etc… people understand that the monopole of their government over money is not necesserly a good thing in their current situation. Use adoption is much stronger in the global south than the north. We also saw during recent protest in France people asking other to move out from the banks and store cash and Bitcoin to destabilize their corrupted system.
I would also like to remind people that without Bitcoin, Sci-Hub and probably WikiLeaks would be dead as both got banned by payment processor. So that is a strong indactor of how useful they can be. Also a non-monetray interesting use is OpenTimeStamps and the guatemala’s election of 2023 that takes benefits from the immuability nature of blocks produced by the consensus. Or also the mining facilities that reduce the price of the electricity bill of nearby citizen, or help renewable energy to sell when there is no demands or simply balanced the electricty grids. But one that I am really excited about is the ones that clear methane from the atmosphere to turn it into bitcoins and make it actual economically viable. It’s not all black or white, we have to see uses outside our comfort zone :D
