After reading such news I have an obvious question. Does anyone know a PayPal-like service, that allows to hide the destination of my transactions from Mastercard / bank, but with a good privacy policy? Or how else can I restrict the usage of my financial data by mastercard or bank?
Best way to hide transactions is with crypto. And namely Monero. Not exactly PayPal like but Monero is the most private.
Unfortunately there are a very small amount of places when I can pay with crypto… I do not want to face also questions from AML officers. I’m not a journalist in the dangerous country or political activist, so Monero looks like an overhead for me.
Monero is for everybody. The most common things I purchase on a monthly basis in Monero are Domino’s Pizza and groceries. And as far as I’m aware, neither of those things are illegal. Monero is money, just like a $100 bill is money (currently). It is perfectly legal to hold and use Monero.
Domino takes crypto now?
No, but it’s very easy to buy a Domino’s gift card with Monero and use that.
Where I live they used to accept BTC. Not Monero unfortunately.
Well, there are plenty of places that do accept Monero. Take a look at https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com which is a small but growing marketplace to buy and sell anything you wish (excluding illegal goods) .
Oh that’s interesting! Thanks for letting me know.
Until you do your taxes. The government hates crypto.
Taxes in the US for crypto are easy. I sold some crypto I had and just put the amount in the other income box and paid the tax.
No it’s not. Crypto is very specifically not that. It’s an open ledger.
This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don’t go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.
Nice try FBI.