| 5 | | Tachanka! accepts bitcoins donations..... |
| | 5 | Tachanka! accepts bitcoins. For the most security when using bitcoins, we recommend that you contact first us so that we can give you a new address to transfer the money to, but for the impatient, we provide one address that anyone may use: |
| | 6 | |
| | 7 | {{{ |
| | 8 | 12LTMBMfUXfJiQ2wtHbRxRDqz1Xbg7XMJ6 |
| | 9 | }}} |
| | 10 | |
| | 11 | Why do we recommend you contact us for a new address? Well, to fully understand this, we thought we should explain a little more about what bitcoins are and aren't. |
| | 12 | |
| | 13 | == Busting the myths == |
| | 14 | |
| | 15 | * '''''Bitcoin is an anonymous, online currency''''' |
| | 16 | |
| | 17 | False. Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor an online currency. Bitcoins are simply a mathematical depiction of a cryptographic algorhythm that has several unique properties allowing it to be used as a currency - that is, something that measures and is able to transmit value. It does ''not'' do this anonymously: every transaction can be followed through, and if it is possible to identify who the owner of a 'wallet' is, then it becomes possible to deduce financial paths as well. This has been written up [http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf in more detail (pdf)] elsewhere. |
| 23 | | * explain how bitcoins can be bought in a couple places in the world in |
| 24 | | a way which preserves the donors' privacy as much as possible (think |
| 25 | | ukash, paysafecard, pre-paid credit cards, other kinds of pre-paid |
| 26 | | systems and vouchers) and with minimum losses in fees (which usually go |
| 27 | | to entities we specifically do not want to support); we should probably |
| 28 | | concentrate on the richer countries there (since this is where we'd hope |
| 29 | | most donations to come from) |
| | 28 | False. Bitcoins are perhaps even safer! In pragmatic terms, however, banking systems are much of a muchness: most of the weaknesses are in the humans who are involved. As the transfer of bitcoins relies only on the sender and receiver to input addresses correctly, there are fewer humans involved than might be employed in the traditional banking system, hence less chance of an error occurring. |
| 31 | | * generate bitcoin addresses in a way which maximizes donor privacy |
| 32 | | (e.g. I'm not sure whether it makes a difference in terms of a third |
| 33 | | party to correlate whether you create 100 addresses at the same or |
| 34 | | whether you spread it out across some days with random intervals) |
| | 30 | == Preserving privacy with bitcoins == |
| | 31 | |
| | 32 | Despite what was said above about privacy, we still believe that bitcoin can offer better privacy preservation than traditional methods of transferring money. Specifically, there is less monitoring - as it is not centrally regulated by any single entity - and there is arguably more anonymity, too. |
| | 33 | |
| | 34 | One generic way of providing some obfuscation is, once you've exchanged your local currency into bitcoins, to then pass them around between a number of different 'wallets' before transferring them onto someone else. Unfortunately, this ''is'' just obfuscation, as the [http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf paper (pdf)] we mentioned earlier indicates. |
| | 35 | |
| | 36 | An alternative is to use an intermediary (or, more than one!) to transfer money from your home currency into bitcoins. For example, if you live in the UK, you can use [http://transferwise.com TransferWise] to transfer money from your account to a EUROs account run by a bitcoin exchange - for instance, [https://bitstamp.net bitstamp.net], who have lower rates than [https://mtgox.com Mt Gox] (the biggest online bitcoin exchange). Using this method, !TransferWise would know the bank details of origin - and hence who was transferring the money, even if you used a pseudonym - but the 'final destination' (i.e. bitstamp.net) would only be presented with the information of !TransferWise. Thus, if the bitstamp net account is registered anonymously (for instance, an account created from a net cafe over [http://tor.eff.org Tor]), then maximum privacy would be ensured. |
