I feel like this is a hack that is rarely talked about. And it's the most reliable method I've found for getting an email account that I can use for signing up to other websites.
Imagine you want to create a completely anonymous account on some website. Most websites require an email account to sign up. if you're lucky you can use one of those a temporary email services, but many websites block those nowadays. They only accept trusted email providers like Gmail, Protonmail, etc. And trying to make an anonymous account on those providers is difficult. Even Protonmail, surprisingly. If you try to sign up for Protonmail using a VPN or Tor, they will ask for a phone number or a second email account. So now you have to get a phone number anonymously (very difficult), or get another email account anonymously, back to square one.
Darknet markets solve this problem. Pay a bit of Monero, and you get an account. Completely anonymous. Now I won't pretend it's easy. Even just signing up for a darknet market often requires learning how to PGP encrypt/decrypt messages. But it only takes an 30 min or so to figure it out and sign up, and it opens up a new world of tools to use for privacy. There are many other types of accounts that you can buy aside from Protonmail, and many other products in general that you can buy.
I don't get why Protonmail doesn't just accept anonymous crypto as an option during signup, but until they do this is honestly the most reliable option I've found. I really wish more websites just accepted crypto for account creation. It's understandable that in order to prevent spam accounts, account creation has to cost something, and crypto allows it to cost something without costing your privacy.
Anyways, here's a quick guide to get started. I'll avoid direct links since I don't know if those are allowed.
- install Tor Browser Bundle, and use it for the following steps
- search for websites like Daunt, Dread forums, and Tor Taxi. Darknet markets change all the time so use those websites to figure out which ones are currently active. Cross-check links across multiple websites to make sure they are trustworthy, since often scam websites will try to pose as legitimate ones
- look for markets that let you search for the product you're interested in before signing up, to save you time
- some markets require you to load funds into the market and then pay using those funds. Avoid loading more than you need, since some markets have "rugpulled" before (aka taken everybody's funds and disappeared. This is the risk of an anonymous market).
Edit: also if for some reason a seller doesn't accept Monero, you can use a crypto swap. Basically you send the swap service some Monero, tell them what crypto to convert it to (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), and where to send it to. Many can be used anonymously, without signup
Oh, yeah. That’s a very real possibility. I assume trading only with trusted online friends (obviously one might trust the wrong person, but plenty of people have 20+ year old friendships with people whom they’ve never met irl, and ) would compound the problem by making your online network even more traceable?
That's another tricky question. I suppose it's possible to make an anonymous online connection, chat with them long enough to be confident that they aren't a fed, and then trade emails. Sounds like a lot of work though 😅
Some things to be cautious about though. If this is a friend that you made over non-anonymous channels, eg Facebook or Discord, then the feds may have already established a link between you two. I'm sure the feds create big social graphs that map the connections between everybody. So if you trade emails with a friend, and then do something illegal with that email, the feds go to your friend, realize that they have the wrong person, and even if your friend doesn't give up any info, the feds might investigate you anyways due to your connection to them.
Yeah, I think you’re right and it’s unlikely that many people have such long friendships with people over entirely private media.
If you’re enjoying the hypotheticals, I’ve got another, but if they’re unhelpful/distracting, don’t feel obligated to indulge me. What if you had an open, anonymous community sharing a chain of emails, so each person joining the group would receive the email account made by the person before them and would make an email for the person joining after them? Obviously the feds could still infiltrate it, but they’d have a lot less data from any given user and they’d get the most data from the person who joins after they do, which they can’t control. Unless they monitor it 24/7 and get lucky, they wouldn’t be able to make sure every other user is a fed. That seems like it would also be relatively easy to detect, if every single time a new account joined, another immediately followed.
keep the hypotheticals coming! They're always fun to think about.
The problem with the chain sharing idea, is all it takes is one person to not make an email for the next person, and the chain is broken.
It sounds like you are trying to create a system for anonymously trading emails. Maybe you invent a fancy system where you have to give an email in order to receive one. But why stop there? What if somebody comes along and says "I'm not very good at making emails, but I can write songs. Can I trade a song for an email address?" And then somebody else says "Sure! Man it would be nice if there were some intermediate form of value that we could use to trade goods and services, instead of just trading emails directly". Voila, the invention of currency :). This is effectively what the darknet market is. A way to anonymously trade goods and services.
Yeah, I figured the prior person’s information would only be released when the new user provides the details for a valid email account. I’m (clearly) not a tech person, but that sounds relatively doable.
The problem with changing the terms is that you don’t know who’s going to join after you, so you don’t know that they want a song. You can look at that as the free market in action, but it’s also effectively a dead end for a purpose-built group.
It has also just occurred to me that people who want to commit fraud would also be interested in this, and perhaps giving them the opportunity to collect a bunch of potential blackmail ammunition is not ideal.
fair enough, this is how the darknet market works too. You provide payment, and then the email account is given to you.
But wouldn't the free market provide more? For the purpose-built group to work, say the group had 10 people. All 10 people would each ask for one email, while each supplying one email. The free market would be able to serve this group as well. If we price an email at $10, each person would sell their email for $10 and then buy one for $10 for a net gain/loss of $0. Emails are traded, and nobody gains/loses money. What the free market does is allow other goods and services to be exhanged for emails as well, like songs.
Privacy tools can also be used by criminals. I prefer that police focus on the crime and not the tools used for the crime (unless those tools were built specifically for that crime in mjnd). Though there are some cases where it makes sense to regulate tools simply to reduce risk.