If Unknown Fund is not a recognized non-profit in at least one (or more?) countries, would any project that receives funding see their owners having to pay tax on the grants?
Given the nature, purpose and stated distribution mechanism of the fund on the website, it's highly unlikely Unknown Fund would register as a formal private foundation. I'm not sure how that works.
How this works? They send btc and people use them. You're thinking in the old frame of reference: you don't need banks, legal entities or identities even to produce code. Who cares if it's recognized or not.
What would the attack be? Someone applies and they... now have their email address and business info, which is probably public or easily discovered anyway?
I was going to agree with you that it seemed an unlikely attack vector. But... Craig Wright shows the lengths that people will go to for seemingly no reason other than status.
Did Craig ever get anything? (Other than a whole lot of trouble.) I don't remember if people figured out what his original motive was.
Ah, think of it like this: you behave much differently when you talk to someone you think has loads of money and might be interested in investing in your ideas. That means they're in a position to start making some very interesting connections that they otherwise wouldn't have access to.
The VC model works via reputation. When you take away reputation, you're left with questions like "Should we spend time trying to convince this person to give us money? Will they want unreasonable terms? How long will the process take? What if they string us along but never actually sign a check (which is what happens most of the time anyway)?"
All that said, this is wild speculation. But your comment was a neat prompt for speculation.
It's also suspicious that the page's title says $100 Million, and the headline says $75 Million. A bunch of the meta tags also say "$100" (without any "million").
Proof seems necessary when they obviously changed how much money they were saying they had by $25 million.
That much could easily be explained by when they were checking the valuation of BTC. Within the last month price has swung anywhere between ~$7,500 and ~$10,000.
Yes, it's a bit weird. OTOH, if real, this would be on the same order of magnitude as the Pineapple Fund bitcoin donations, which ultimately disbursed around $55M.
I think this "solution" is the exact inverse of what is actually needed: Strong identity and attribution.
identity need not be just an "individual". It can be a group of individuals that agree to mutually sign data before dissemination.
Individuals, corporations and your toaster can create as many identities as necessary.
Right now we are all living seemingly schizoid lifestyle because we are forced to partition multiple selves into molds that are being provided to us.
The partitioning is necessary for organizing information. But the way it is partitioned should be flexible enough for the end user to have the ultimate say in what and how that information is curated. Currently, all we have are blackbox "algorithms." People are asking for transparency, thinking this will solve the problem. I think it will only lead to obfuscating the problem even more so.
Until the individual has unfettered control, we will always be playing this game.
I really wish conversations would wind back to towards discussing ideas tangential to the web of trust...
I think that problem was hard to solve for a reason. Being impossible not being one of them... but an easy position to sell if you feared the consequences ultimately lead to a loss of control.
You're getting downvoted, but you are at least mostly right.
With video and audio deep fakes we are rapidly approaching a world where anything can be trivially faked by anyone. As a result, anonymous information is becoming worthless. Unless the provenance and chain of custody of a piece of evidence is precisely known, it has a high and growing likelihood of being bullshit.
I do think there are roles for anonymity, but getting "the truth" out is not one of them.
What is far more important is selective privacy and the ability for individuals to define their own envelope of visibility and trust.
In case it wasn't clear, I am not suggesting ALL data must be signed/attributed.
Entertainment, for example, can be safely consumed and have little impact on your day to day regardless of the source. Provided it's clearly meant for entertainment purposes.
However once you introduce some dependency of trust into your process (monetary transactions, health related data exchange, etc), I believe most people in this crowd would agree that they want crypto identity and attribution applied to the data at every stage of transformation.
And then there's everything in the middle... which again, I think should be left to the individual. Norms would eventually develop that would guide best practices.
Pipe dream stuff I know, but I don't see another way out. Open to other suggestions. And especially open to criticism about this approach. I don't want to be the one with the answer.
My comment was really a response to the downvotes more than you. I'm not downplaying that the tech involved with OP. It just doesn't appear to solve the problem it's targeting.
Identity is basically a combination of certain Verified Claims about yourself, signed by some third parties. Given enough of these, you can uniquely identify one or a few people in a given population.
These are all things that we should have a say in how they is used, instead of unilateral usage by third parties such as credit reporting agencies, social networks and banks.
We need to fund tech that gives us the power over our own identity! Like telling friends who you are on some networks and not others, instead of Instagram and Telegram assuming all your FB friends or phone contacts should know.
I like Mozilla’s fund too. I like NIST’s NSTIC grants. We need more!
Identity is important for reputation and so on. But we have to unbundle the claim verification service from the certificate, we should make it so you can’t be tracked between domains. One Government ID or Facebook ID for everything may be one of the least libertarian and least secure ways to do it.
I find the use of a ProtonMail address to be interesting. Don't they require the use of an existing email address, phone number, or credit card/PayPal donation to create an account? I just tried creating an account via Tor for test purposes, and it was immediately disabled "for abuse or fraud".
Couldn't this mean that some entity could submit a legal request to ProtonMail for said information in the event of an investigation?
Edit: The site is also hosted on Squarespace. Why not something more anonymous, like an onion service, IPFS, ZeroNet, etc?
Just created a free account, it didn't ask for anything other than a desired email and password. The recovery email was optional. It does ask for an existing email to verify the account. It accepted my Gmail address.
Does it require a phone number, or just prompt for it? From what I've heard, it always has a field for a phone number, but it sometim es lets you submit without one (based on some sort of not-a-bot trust score, ReCAPTCHA v3 maybe?)
What combination of steps have you found that don't require revealing some type of real-world identifier? Trying emails from providers that don't require me to give up info seems to result in the account getting immediately banned.
I can't seem to find any info on whether they allow prepaid credit cards. If they don't, then we're still stuck with the same issue of requiring real-world identifiers.
The neverending ddos's and online fud against protonmail suggests that it irks some state level actors, no individual nor private group has such means or motivation. Make of that what you will.
The people who could make it happen didn't have the resources. Your rebuttal is a poor one; of course there are enough resources, but that doesn't mean they are allocated ideally.
I looked through your comment history very briefly and only a couple of pages. You are active on r/space and use a CB radio in your vehicle. You're probably an interesting/good person to know, but alas I still have no idea who you are. I wish you the best, and I'm sorry if I was too hostile (reading it later, it seems that way, and it wasn't my intention).
Not wanting to deal with spam and abuse originating from their service, most likely. Similar to most services which "require some form of identification" - and an underappreciated hurdle for any sort of reliable anonymity!
I salute this initiative but the focus on corporate surveillance is a bit strange. Snowden demonstrated that corporations either don't have a choice or are complicit in surveillance, why not target the source of the problem which seems to be the regulators who have been hijacked from within? I mean the problem is not technological, it's political.
Is it not a little ironic that this payout is in bitcoin, that has been repeatedly shown to be the furthest thing from anonymous? Would they not be better off exchanging it for a coin with baked in anonymity?
I hate to be that guy, but I'm curious what they do with the $5k/year it was a few years ago. I don't recall hearing that much about the money, as it was given to them by the government.
I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity. There are tons of use cases for identity and privacy, but anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow. You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target.
To value strong anonymity, you need to be part of either an underclass group, or have enough wealth that it needs protection internationally, with a big gap for use cases in between.
There are tons of criminal use cases for anonymity that facilitate the needs and desperation of people afflicted by poverty, but those are illegal precisely because the line between relieving and exploiting poverty is so grey. Lotteries are a great example, as are cash jobs, narco logistics, vice and sex trade, short term loans, gambling, escrow payments for irregular immigration. These are all things people do for either survival or relief where to facilitate them is exploitative. Arguable, but that's the mainstream view.
On the upper end, moving collateral around to protect the "beneficial owner," of an asset like art or property just reduces to variations on tax and regulatory avoidance, or sometimes evasion. It's almost uniquely both high risk and boring.
I don't see this fund producing anything interesting.
"You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target."
This describes quite well the process of becoming a political dissident. The value of anonymity is that it allows you to exist in both states at once, both of the middle class and apart from it. By "doxing" dissidents, some hope to eject those people from the middle class, or otherwise make their political activities so costly as to dissuade them entirely.
Anonymity has had a role in Western politics, of saying things which cannot be said, that dates back to at least the 18th century if not earlier. No doubt there are many on this website who will argue that speech without fear of personal reprisal is categorically a bad thing - but uninteresting? I don't think so.
I agree that this fund produce wont produce anything, but only because I believe it's entirely fake.
The classic one is sex. There are many "middle class" folks with proclivities outside of the socially dominant envelope of wherever they are. If those proclivities became publicly known, they would have negative repercussions ranging from social stigma through death.
This is highly context dependent, of course - swinger-couples in one church towns may end up wanting to move; a gay man in many places may end up not being able to. Both have strong interests in securely discussing things without attaching their names to the communications.
The first large experiment with anonymous remailers was anon.penet.fi[1], and I think it demonstrated how much demand for anonymous communication there is - it had over half a million users in the mid-90s, when a vastly smaller percentage of the population was online.
[1] Not strongly anonymous, and people suffered because of that. The Mixmaster remailer network was significantly stronger, but was harder and less forgiving to use, distributed and frequently changing, and somewhat politicized.
> I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity.
I can think of 1000 use cases for strong anonymity.
Thinking of switching a job, thinking of getting a divorce, becoming a whistleblower, investigating symptoms of a disease you may have, forming or joining a union. Or even just showing your irrational spending habits.
These are middle-class, non-criminal things.
Folks will be oppressed on an unprecedented scale, and very cheaply.
Additionally, if we continue without taking action, society will be affected on an unprecedented scale by dataminers from the future. Data collected now or a decade ago may be mined by sophisticated algorithms created a decade from now.
>Thinking of switching a job, thinking of getting a divorce, becoming a whistleblower, investigating symptoms of a disease you may have, forming or joining a union. Or even just showing your irrational spending habits.
Almost everything you've listed there is solved by using private browsing and pseudonyms. That's not strong anonymity. You don't need Tor to unionize.
Labor history is rife with eavesdropping, spying, honey pots and sabotage against workers at the hands of employers. Computers make all of those things easier and cheaper than they were in the past.
Nowadays, firms offering those services go by the names of 'union-avoidance consultancies'[1] among many others. You can Google that term or 'fighting union' for dozens of companies you can hire towards that end.
Also, the Pinkertons[2] are still in business doing what they did 150 years ago.
I suppose Tor specifically is not required, but there are reasons why plenty of "normal people" need strong anonymity. Even if you discount state-sponsored surveillance[1], there are a ton of outfits who are willing to surveil you or your union drive, whether or not it is legal.
But beyond all that, it simply is not your call to make whether or not I need anonymous communications. You don't know why I think I need them, and frankly you don't need to. It is enough that everyone should be able to make that determination for themselves.
[1] Which, if you're unionizing, would be a serious error - there is a long history of less-than-legal state collusion in union busting in the US on top of the legal hostility.
> I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity. There are tons of use cases for identity and privacy, but anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow. You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target.
The middle class still needs to work to eat, and I'm sure there are plenty of online activities that middle class people engage in that they don't need their employer or professional sphere knowing about.
> I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity.
So you don't mind that banks can sell information about where you were, who you are and what you buy, mobile carriers sell information about who you are and where you live and whom do you call? Treating you as a "consumer" without any rights.
The only way to opt from being sold is not to provide information about yourself. Which is called anonimity. Use anonymous cash, anonymous bank account, anonymous messengers, anonymous SIM card. Sadly, most governments don't allow this because they don't want to trust you and they are not at your side but at the side of bigdata traders.
So today you can buy drugs anonymously using Telegram, but cannot buy something anonymously on Ebay using Paypal without filling out a long form with passport data as if you were applying for US visa.
Social media controversies are one use case. We've all heard about the effects of 'cancel culture' and deplatforming, and people going after your livelihood because you said something seen as 'offensive' or politically controversial online.
If you're a very proponent/opponent of something like Brexit, agree with James Damore, think identity politics is bullshit, vocally support the Trump administration/are republican or are involved in some sort of internet controversy, there's definitely a strong middle class use case for anonymity. Makes it so your opponents can't go after your employmeny, friends, relationships, etc.
What about voting? Not anonymous but often secret. But wouldn't the same arguments apply? Or to any privacy in general?
> anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow.
No. You could argue that anonymous alcoholics are preyed upon by society looking down on them, but the argument in general is pretty far out. Are there no alcoholics in the middle class? Do they automatically move in an underclass in this case? If so, the definition of middle class can indeed be trivial reduced to "people not in need of anonymity".
I don't think it has no use cases. Especially if you include topics like religion, sex and politics, the use cases become quite obvious really. An age old constant.
Sweet, another sink for techdollars that isn't public policy. The money should go to lobbyists for anonymity-protecting legislation, not a bitcoinz4startup pipe dream.
Privacy I am all for but universal anonymity not very much. You just need accountability a lot of times.
That said, I can support anonymous systems with transparent de-anonymization. For example, if dragnet deanonymization happens all affected will know and act against the attacker. If Cops deanonymize a suspect, the suspect can enquire about an associated search warrant
78 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadGiven the nature, purpose and stated distribution mechanism of the fund on the website, it's highly unlikely Unknown Fund would register as a formal private foundation. I'm not sure how that works.
Did Craig ever get anything? (Other than a whole lot of trouble.) I don't remember if people figured out what his original motive was.
Ah, think of it like this: you behave much differently when you talk to someone you think has loads of money and might be interested in investing in your ideas. That means they're in a position to start making some very interesting connections that they otherwise wouldn't have access to.
The VC model works via reputation. When you take away reputation, you're left with questions like "Should we spend time trying to convince this person to give us money? Will they want unreasonable terms? How long will the process take? What if they string us along but never actually sign a check (which is what happens most of the time anyway)?"
All that said, this is wild speculation. But your comment was a neat prompt for speculation.
2. Suckers see that as social proof, and assume other investors have done their due diligence
3. They invest
4. The money disappears in suspicious circumstances.
Proof seems necessary when they obviously changed how much money they were saying they had by $25 million.
identity need not be just an "individual". It can be a group of individuals that agree to mutually sign data before dissemination.
Individuals, corporations and your toaster can create as many identities as necessary.
Right now we are all living seemingly schizoid lifestyle because we are forced to partition multiple selves into molds that are being provided to us.
The partitioning is necessary for organizing information. But the way it is partitioned should be flexible enough for the end user to have the ultimate say in what and how that information is curated. Currently, all we have are blackbox "algorithms." People are asking for transparency, thinking this will solve the problem. I think it will only lead to obfuscating the problem even more so.
Until the individual has unfettered control, we will always be playing this game.
I really wish conversations would wind back to towards discussing ideas tangential to the web of trust...
I think that problem was hard to solve for a reason. Being impossible not being one of them... but an easy position to sell if you feared the consequences ultimately lead to a loss of control.
With video and audio deep fakes we are rapidly approaching a world where anything can be trivially faked by anyone. As a result, anonymous information is becoming worthless. Unless the provenance and chain of custody of a piece of evidence is precisely known, it has a high and growing likelihood of being bullshit.
I do think there are roles for anonymity, but getting "the truth" out is not one of them.
What is far more important is selective privacy and the ability for individuals to define their own envelope of visibility and trust.
Entertainment, for example, can be safely consumed and have little impact on your day to day regardless of the source. Provided it's clearly meant for entertainment purposes.
However once you introduce some dependency of trust into your process (monetary transactions, health related data exchange, etc), I believe most people in this crowd would agree that they want crypto identity and attribution applied to the data at every stage of transformation.
And then there's everything in the middle... which again, I think should be left to the individual. Norms would eventually develop that would guide best practices.
Pipe dream stuff I know, but I don't see another way out. Open to other suggestions. And especially open to criticism about this approach. I don't want to be the one with the answer.
I just want an answer.
These are all things that we should have a say in how they is used, instead of unilateral usage by third parties such as credit reporting agencies, social networks and banks.
We need to fund tech that gives us the power over our own identity! Like telling friends who you are on some networks and not others, instead of Instagram and Telegram assuming all your FB friends or phone contacts should know.
I like Mozilla’s fund too. I like NIST’s NSTIC grants. We need more!
Identity is important for reputation and so on. But we have to unbundle the claim verification service from the certificate, we should make it so you can’t be tracked between domains. One Government ID or Facebook ID for everything may be one of the least libertarian and least secure ways to do it.
So if you more info and SOLUTIONS just check out:
https://github.com/Qbix/auth
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114
https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-dece...
nooooope. Not touching any company involved with this with a ten foot pole.
Couldn't this mean that some entity could submit a legal request to ProtonMail for said information in the event of an investigation?
Edit: The site is also hosted on Squarespace. Why not something more anonymous, like an onion service, IPFS, ZeroNet, etc?
Edit: Just tried creating a Gmail, it required a phone number.
Edit: To my recollection / when I created my account(s).
The procedure may have changed. They occasionally do for services.
Nothing is impossible with the right resources.
And yet we still can't manage to put a person on Mars despite having the resources to do so for over half a century.
Your adversary has a budget too.
It's very clear who I am.
Wasabi Wallet has built in trustless coinjoins, routed through tor by default: https://wasabiwallet.io/
Samourai Wallet has similar features, requiring a much smaller amount of coins: https://samouraiwallet.com/
I assume anyone competent enough to hang on to this amount of bitcoin is already doing this.
I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity. There are tons of use cases for identity and privacy, but anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow. You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target.
To value strong anonymity, you need to be part of either an underclass group, or have enough wealth that it needs protection internationally, with a big gap for use cases in between.
There are tons of criminal use cases for anonymity that facilitate the needs and desperation of people afflicted by poverty, but those are illegal precisely because the line between relieving and exploiting poverty is so grey. Lotteries are a great example, as are cash jobs, narco logistics, vice and sex trade, short term loans, gambling, escrow payments for irregular immigration. These are all things people do for either survival or relief where to facilitate them is exploitative. Arguable, but that's the mainstream view.
On the upper end, moving collateral around to protect the "beneficial owner," of an asset like art or property just reduces to variations on tax and regulatory avoidance, or sometimes evasion. It's almost uniquely both high risk and boring.
I don't see this fund producing anything interesting.
It produced this announcement, which is interesting by evidence of people, including yourself, engaging with it.
This describes quite well the process of becoming a political dissident. The value of anonymity is that it allows you to exist in both states at once, both of the middle class and apart from it. By "doxing" dissidents, some hope to eject those people from the middle class, or otherwise make their political activities so costly as to dissuade them entirely.
Anonymity has had a role in Western politics, of saying things which cannot be said, that dates back to at least the 18th century if not earlier. No doubt there are many on this website who will argue that speech without fear of personal reprisal is categorically a bad thing - but uninteresting? I don't think so.
I agree that this fund produce wont produce anything, but only because I believe it's entirely fake.
This is highly context dependent, of course - swinger-couples in one church towns may end up wanting to move; a gay man in many places may end up not being able to. Both have strong interests in securely discussing things without attaching their names to the communications.
The first large experiment with anonymous remailers was anon.penet.fi[1], and I think it demonstrated how much demand for anonymous communication there is - it had over half a million users in the mid-90s, when a vastly smaller percentage of the population was online.
[1] Not strongly anonymous, and people suffered because of that. The Mixmaster remailer network was significantly stronger, but was harder and less forgiving to use, distributed and frequently changing, and somewhat politicized.
I can think of 1000 use cases for strong anonymity.
Thinking of switching a job, thinking of getting a divorce, becoming a whistleblower, investigating symptoms of a disease you may have, forming or joining a union. Or even just showing your irrational spending habits.
These are middle-class, non-criminal things.
Folks will be oppressed on an unprecedented scale, and very cheaply.
Additionally, if we continue without taking action, society will be affected on an unprecedented scale by dataminers from the future. Data collected now or a decade ago may be mined by sophisticated algorithms created a decade from now.
Almost everything you've listed there is solved by using private browsing and pseudonyms. That's not strong anonymity. You don't need Tor to unionize.
Labor history is rife with eavesdropping, spying, honey pots and sabotage against workers at the hands of employers. Computers make all of those things easier and cheaper than they were in the past.
Nowadays, firms offering those services go by the names of 'union-avoidance consultancies'[1] among many others. You can Google that term or 'fighting union' for dozens of companies you can hire towards that end.
Also, the Pinkertons[2] are still in business doing what they did 150 years ago.
[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/union-busters-are-more-prevalent-th...
[2] https://www.pinkerton.com
> You don't need Tor to unionize.
Do journalists need Tor? Do lawyers?
I suppose Tor specifically is not required, but there are reasons why plenty of "normal people" need strong anonymity. Even if you discount state-sponsored surveillance[1], there are a ton of outfits who are willing to surveil you or your union drive, whether or not it is legal.
But beyond all that, it simply is not your call to make whether or not I need anonymous communications. You don't know why I think I need them, and frankly you don't need to. It is enough that everyone should be able to make that determination for themselves.
[1] Which, if you're unionizing, would be a serious error - there is a long history of less-than-legal state collusion in union busting in the US on top of the legal hostility.
The middle class still needs to work to eat, and I'm sure there are plenty of online activities that middle class people engage in that they don't need their employer or professional sphere knowing about.
So you don't mind that banks can sell information about where you were, who you are and what you buy, mobile carriers sell information about who you are and where you live and whom do you call? Treating you as a "consumer" without any rights.
The only way to opt from being sold is not to provide information about yourself. Which is called anonimity. Use anonymous cash, anonymous bank account, anonymous messengers, anonymous SIM card. Sadly, most governments don't allow this because they don't want to trust you and they are not at your side but at the side of bigdata traders.
So today you can buy drugs anonymously using Telegram, but cannot buy something anonymously on Ebay using Paypal without filling out a long form with passport data as if you were applying for US visa.
If you're a very proponent/opponent of something like Brexit, agree with James Damore, think identity politics is bullshit, vocally support the Trump administration/are republican or are involved in some sort of internet controversy, there's definitely a strong middle class use case for anonymity. Makes it so your opponents can't go after your employmeny, friends, relationships, etc.
> anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow.
No. You could argue that anonymous alcoholics are preyed upon by society looking down on them, but the argument in general is pretty far out. Are there no alcoholics in the middle class? Do they automatically move in an underclass in this case? If so, the definition of middle class can indeed be trivial reduced to "people not in need of anonymity".
I don't think it has no use cases. Especially if you include topics like religion, sex and politics, the use cases become quite obvious really. An age old constant.
This has to be someone's tax shelter.
but of dubious merit when presented with the Guy Fawkes' mask, especially in today's online battlegrounds.
1) you create an anonymous Bitcoin fund
2) you apply and say you received funds from them
Money laundered.
That said, I can support anonymous systems with transparent de-anonymization. For example, if dragnet deanonymization happens all affected will know and act against the attacker. If Cops deanonymize a suspect, the suspect can enquire about an associated search warrant
I emailed these a$$h0l3$ and 12 hours later Experian sent me a note that someone is trying to apply for credit in my name.
WATCH OUT.