pertinax

privacy

Recently bought a [Mudi router](https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-e750/) after seeing it recommended for GrapheneOS users around here on SN. One thing I've seen a few people mention is that they use a pay-as-you-go SIM in the router and never put one in the phone. What are some good SIM cards where I can:

1. Prepay so I can switch them relatively frequently (GrapheneOS users -- do you actually do this? Does the cost of doing so add up?). I'm only really finding things like "Pay X amount per month for Y amount of data".
2. Decent speed and coverage (currently in US).
3. Pay with Bitcoin...? ;)

I'm doing this partially because I've seen posts where people say you should separate the SIM from the device. why does this make a difference if presumably the router is going everywhere with me just like my phone? Any other tips for using this in a privacy preserving way?


What SIM cards do you use for travel routers like Mudi?

bitcoin

Are there tools that allow a website to accept fiat, or bitcoin at a discount?

It looks like zaprite is exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Pity they don't seem to be open source though

I'd love to see an example of a widget or library that allows a website to accept payments in either fiat or bitcoin. I'm thinking something like Substack, for example. What if you could pay in bitcoin or fiat, but the writer offered discounts in bitcoin? It could be a way for nocoiners to consider obtaining bitcoin for services they want but can't get at the same prices. It would also open up more options for consumers. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to make a small payment for a _single_ article, but had to sign up for a monthly subscription or something and decided not to.

Anyway, a widget dedicated to something like this would make it easier to try to integrate with established websites and potentially bigger players (since we're not trying to cut off a revenue stream by supplanting fiat, just adding supplementary options), instead of the tiny circular economies we see with most bitcoin/nostr-based apps now.

Are gift cards the best we can do for no-KYC lightning trades?

I've taken a look at this and it has some very good UX. Was hard to find trades in my currency using Amazon gift cards though, but I'll keep trying it. It's also unfortunate that since it's Telegram you do need to give up a phone number. But I guess that's one of the reasons they're building Mostro.

Thanks, I love the idea and will try to do that more, but the overhead there I think is massive compared to the gift card thing. But much more fun I bet :)

Thanks for the advice, I will try more to work for it. I think this is probably one of those things that is great in theory, but in practice is incredibly difficult in our tiny circular economies _for now_, but we'll get there.

I use the "trade" terminology because that's the lingo [robosats uses](https://learn.robosats.com/docs/trade-pipeline/), not because I'm trying to sell. The fiat is only going one way with me: _out_.

This looks awesome! Is there a live site or is it still in development? Or can I run it myself locally? When going to https://mostro.network/ I only see development updates

It seems there are really only a couple ways to buy bitcoin without leaving a digital trail:

1) Buy from someone in person
2) Send cash via mail order, wait for the seller to send the bitcoin, using something like Bisq for escrow
3) Buy gift cards (i.e. Amazon) with cash and sell them p2p.
4) Buy from ATM's.

The problems with 1) are:

- What if I don't know anybody in person who's willing to sell?
- Maybe I do, but I don't want them to know how much bitcoin I have, and I am revealing my identity to them.
- They may be an inconsistent source of bitcoin (maybe they only wanted to sell one time or in specific conditions)

Problems with 2) are:

- Trades take a long time to finish and are inconvenient.
- Risky, since it could get lost in the mail? I'm not sure how common this is.
- Only onchain available.

Problems with 3):

- Can't do very large amounts.
- The buyer of the gift card doesn't know where they were sourced from so Amazon accounts, for example, could get cancelled if they look suspicious.
- Since what you can buy is limited to what the company offers, and since there's more inherent risk, you have to pay a much higher premium than other methods, except maybe ATM.
- Have to keep walking into stores and buying gift cards all the time.

Problems with 4):
- Very few no-KYC ATMs (if any?).
- It seems at minimum (for LibertyX, which as far as I could tell is the most widely available low-KYC), you need a phone number, so if you really wanted no-KYC then you'd have to buy a burner phone just for this or use something like [lnvpn's phone number service](https://lnvpn.net/phone-numbers) while you make the purchase.
- High fees

Given the convenience and extra privacy benefits that come with lightning if done correctly, my favorite so far has been to use [robosats](http://learn.robosats.com/) with method 3) using a custodial lightning address that was signed up for with an anonymous email using something like protonmail or tutanota.

You could probably do even better by getting a custodial lightning address by signing up with nostr (you can do this flow here on SN for example).

Disappointingly, it seems that most trades on all these p2p sites happen with things that are not really no-KYC if push came to shove. Most people seem to be using Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, Zelle, or, even worse, Strike, and they therefore have to trust a) their trading partner and b) the company to not dox their banking details, and c) their bank to not get suspicious for some reason and freeze their account.

c) happened recently to a stacker [here](https://stacker.news/items/257437), he may have thought he was being no-KYC, and maybe his bank doesn't know he bought bitcoin, but the result of his frequent trading was a frozen bank account and a fraud investigation due to this p2p trading. And this type of p2p trading seems most popular on all the p2p sites. Unfortunately, the only large trades over lightning seem to be done this way.

In an ideal scenario, I would use something like a no-KYC CashApp that I could load up to get the best of both worlds -- nothing tied to me, but also the much lower fees, faster & more convenient trading, and much larger volumes that I can't get right now with the credit card method.

I thought about using reloadable prepaid VISA/Mastercard gift cards, but it doesn't seem possible to use them on things like CashApp/Venmo etc., and they have high fees for use anyway. 

Has anyone figured out a better solution here? I'll keep doing the gift card or cash by mail methods if need be, but it's crazy that there isn't another way. I guess that's why we need bitcoin in the first place.

Stacker News Tor site regularly down

Thanks! Wanted to be sure I wasn't doing anything dumb

The tor site: snsnsnya6h3ot563f3p566wuhfoklkg5f62hokdlaqzcaub3gf4xlxyd.onion/ seems to be online about 60-70% of the time for me. I noticed there is an open issue on it [here](https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/400), but it hasn't had any comments for over a month. Does this happen to anyone else?