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Sure, sounds good. For monero specifically, maybe standing up your own LWS server anonymously (using a VPS paid in monero). My understanding is that drastically improves the user experience, never done it before though. I'm interested to hear your tricks. I don't want to have to pay for 5 different tuta subscriptions that I connect to using a different source VPN ip just to properly segment my identity lol.
Great, that's the best model.
I would say maybe pick the US for one and Europe for the other. My understanding is it's a bit easier in Latin America and some other nations where they offer more bank privacy for transfers and some more robust services along that end. The Asian countries are all different enough to warrant individual guides I think, but that would likely be a huge PITA.
Yeah, I don't want to do some weird nested payment app bank transfer that's slightly obscure, but mostly serves to flag me as suspicious without actually hiding my activity from a subpoena. Physical cash in hand. Honestly someone could probably design a system though where you generate a new bank card that has credentials for it from the monero sender with an empty account and that empty account receives your physical cash deposit at an ATM. Then they send you the monero after the deposit is processed. Something like that would be cool too.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
Setting up your own LWS server on an anonymous VPS (paid for with XMR) is a great idea, and it would fit the series’ experiment posts really well. Noted.
As for email, I actually have a simple, small but effective method. Since I’m keeping it separate from the series, I’m planning to write it up as a standalone post whenever I find the time.
Thanks for clarifying the cash part, so physical cash in hand. A post from that angle could be written, but I won’t put it in the first batch. As I said, I’ll stock up a few posts at the start, and I don’t want working through that stock to take too long either. Still, I’ve noted it for later. The idea of depositing cash into an empty account at an ATM is interesting too, and I could cover it in that post.
Thanks for your suggestions, these are really nice post ideas. One thing I should mention: “getting started” posts for different topics and general real-life privacy are good ideas, but I’d like to keep the series closer to the Monero framework. So instead of including them in the series, I’ll keep them aside as independent posts that I’ll write when I find the time. For example, I have a few “tricks” of my own for anonymous email, and a post about them would be good content. But as I said, I’ll keep these separate from the series, as ideas I might write independently.
By the way, in the first post (and in any other privacy-related posts) I treat the observer as an actor with as much power as possible, so that what I describe also holds up against a strong observer.
A guide to buying Monero with cash is a valuable topic, but honestly, as you said yourself, it’s a real headache. Somewhere along the way something with KYC always comes into play, and the further you move away from KYC, the more niche the methods get and the fewer people can actually use them. The methods also differ from country to country (sometimes even from city to city), so it’s hard to produce a guide that is both safe and useful for most people. It’s not something I’m planning to write right now, and since it would be so time-consuming, I probably won’t write it any time soon, maybe not for a long while. Still, down the line it would be nice to have an “options” guide covering the methods with their pros, cons, and risks.
By the way, when you say “cash”, do you mean using cash in hand without any intermediary like a bank, or buying Monero with fiat money in general? I’m curious, because the perspective of the topic would change depending on that.