Bitcoin payment and privacy

[foxylady]

OK so I've never used bitcoin before. But since you offer it as a payment method I looked into it and, as is so often the case, it's a little more complex than I thought. For me using BTC only makes sense if it increases my anonymity. Just going and buying bitcoins, then using those to purchase something does not do that, in contrast to many people's expectations (including mine).

I read up a bit, and I know that if I want to do it right, I will have to first see about buying BTC anonymously, then going the TOR way, preferably using a different OS from the Windows I'm using now (Tails for example), then start juggling with multiple wallets and mixers. However, since I do not plan on purchasing any goods from the darknet for the time being, that might be a little too much hassle.

So I'd like to take the "privacy light" route and since I am still unsure about many things I would appreciate any comments or recommendations.

What I did so far:

• Installed Electrum and created a wallet.
• Bought 10€ worth of BTC from AnycoinDirect for testing. They let you buy up to 100€ without checking your identity. So what links me there is the service I used to transfer the money from my bank account.
• Found out about coin mixing and used CoinMixer to send the coins to myself using two different new addresses from my wallet. That worked, but I can't tell if it has improved anything, privacywise (or at least I don't know how to check).

Now to get my hands on the delicious RedFox goods I would purchase some more BTC, then pay via a mixer, using made up data and a (throwaway?) address capable of receiving attachments (does the key still come as a file, or do I get text I can enter somewhere?).

Does that sound sensible? How would or how did you guys do it?


BTW: Concerning the made-up data. It's not that I don't trust the people at RedFox, It's just that what they need from me is my money, which I am more than happy to give them. As far as I can imagine, registration data is more or less irrelevant. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Ivan]

Welcome to RedFox forums, foxylady (I really like your name )!

Mixing thru a Bitcoin rumbler like CoinMixer is not really neccessary, but it's up to you.

The personal data we collect on checkout page are required by credit card processors to avoid and identify credit card theft. RedFox does not need any personal data of you (just a valid email address to send you the license key(s)).

So if you pay with Bitcoin, we don't need any personal data. Since fields are mandatory, just enter something like Santa Claus, North Pole...

And I'll tell you another secret (it's more a bug workaround than a secret):
The moment you have sent the required Bitcoin amount to the Bitcoin address shown on last checkout page, press F5 for refresh and you will get the download link for your license.
I have to fix it, so an automated refresh is done instantly when we receive a Bitcoin payment, but my todo list is long...

In case you don't get any license download link and/or the email address you entered was fake: sent me a PM and I'll get the license download link for you.

Thanks for supporting us!

Ivan

 

[foxylady]

Thank you Ivan, I'll give it a go.

 

[ghelyar]

You're largely going overboard on the tin foil hat. Bitcoin is relatively anonymous out of the box. Someone can look at the block chain and see that X address received Y coins from Z address, but that doesn't tell them who owns X or Z.

For example, if you buy bitcoin for cash then spend it on something, there is nothing to trace that bitcoin address to you personally unless you have said somewhere that the address belongs to you. However, the anonymity is lost if you ever link that address to yourself. You can view all of the transactions an address has ever made, so once someone can link a person with an address, they can see all of that person's transactions. As long as you have no personal information associated with your address, you don't really have anything to worry about. Mixing can make it more anonymous if you're really paranoid but it will slow down the payment and probably isn't necessary if you're not doing anything illegal.

You can also generate a temporary email address which will forward to a real email address if you're that paranoid, but this tends to make recovery a problem later.

As redfox don't actually need your personal details in order to accept a bitcoin payment, they may be better off just having a separate payment page for bitcoin to make the process easier. I have done this before. It's not difficult and there are libraries like zxing which can generate QR codes if anyone has ever actually used those. It's just a case of uniquely identifying each transaction with a temporary token, associating some data with it (in the receiver's database, not the blockchain - in this case it sounds like just an email address) and deciding how much verification is enough, because even 1 can take a while. The token tends to expire just due to the volatility of bitcoin - you don't want someone using prices from 6 months ago to make a purchase. Whether it's worth spending the dev effort on it really depends on how much custom goes through bitcoin. In my case after all of that dev effort it was almost none because people were a lot more vocal about wanting bitcoin than actually using it, and the future bitcoin is uncertain at the moment to say the least.

 

[foxylady]

Thanks to you, too, ghelyar. You are probably right about the tinfoil hat, but I'm just finding out about my options, and I like to err on the cautious side. I would like to buy BTC for cash or via paysafecard, but the alternatives I am aware of are either pretty expensive and/or difficult to trust. Unfortunately localbitcoins.com is not available in Germany.

 

[ghelyar]

Yes the most difficult part of using bitcoins I found was getting them in the first place, which varies wildly by country. Some some countries have bitcoin exchanges where you can just buy them online with a card like a normal purchase, while I had to find an online marketplace and an individual seller to communicate with through the buying process, so that they could check their bank account before sending bitcoin, with nothing but their reputation to protect the sale. On top of that, you can't get the exact amount you want, and the price will change so by the time you have the amount of bitcoin you require, you may have too much or too little, and selling off your excess bitcoin has the same problems but in reverse.

These problems make bitcoin impractical as a buyer, while having to wait tens of minutes to hours for verification or just risk accepting unverified payments (which is fine if you can later cancel reliably) makes them impractical as a seller.

 

[Ivan]

Thanks to you, too, ghelyar. You are probably right about the tinfoil hat, but I'm just finding out about my options, and I like to err on the cautious side. I would like to buy BTC for cash or via paysafecard, but the alternatives I am aware of are either pretty expensive and/or difficult to trust. Unfortunately localbitcoins.com is not available in Germany.

In Germany, you can give mycard2go a try, a prepaid VISA. Anonymous up to 100 EUR, availably an most gas stations:
https://login.mycard2go.com/df/#/stationfinder/map

edit: German "way" of localbitcoins.com: http://bitcoin-treff.de/