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.
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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.
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
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.
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).