How Crypto Is Changing What Online Privacy Means

The internet has never been very secretive. Whenever you register for anything, pay or even create an account, you leave a trail. For a very long time, most people just accepted that. It was the price of doing things online.

But that’s starting to change. Not only are the tech crowd starting to question why they would have to surrender a lot of personal information just to perform a basic task, but crypto has also emerged as one of the more useful solutions to that question.

You Can Pay or Play Without Proving Who You Are

The majority of payment systems were based on trust in institutions. To move money, banks, card networks, and card payment processors all require information about who you are before they will allow you to do so. That makes sense under certain circumstances. But it also implies that a lot of personal information is gathered and archived, at times from companies you hardly know.

Crypto works differently. When transferring crypto, you are not required to give out your name, address, or any ID. All you need is a wallet address. The transaction is registered in a public ledger, but no one can, under any circumstances, infer who you are, unless you tell them so.

That is why crypto has spread to areas where individuals were simply keen on getting things done without leaving a trace. A good example is the growth of the no-KYC crypto casino—an online gambling site that allows you to play by using crypto without ever uploading your ID or passport. Sites such as those that CryptoManiaks cover have become fast-growing due to players being fed up with jumping through hoops in order to place a bet.

Whenever you try to sign up with one of the traditional betting sites, the procedure is familiar: scan your ID, snap a photo, wait a few days, and hopefully, you are asked to submit some extraneous paperwork. You can be playing within minutes with a crypto casino that does not require all that. And not a single bit of your personal information is stored on a company’s servers.

It’s Not Just Gambling

The same concept is spreading everywhere on the internet. The crypto world is divided: on the one hand, centralized exchanges have you make an account after which you can lend, borrow and trade; on the other hand, decentralized platforms allow you to do the same without an account.

Crypto is also being integrated into some VPN and cloud storage services, so they do not need to store your billing information. E-commerce is enabling both the buyer and the seller to handle one another through wallet addresses instead of names and emails.

It all comes down to how a crypto wallet works. When you create one, it brings out a private key – a very long password which you are the only person to know. The key will automatically create your wallet address. None of the companies give it to you, and nobody has a copy. As long as you do not lose your private key, you can be in total control.

Other coins even go a step further as far as privacy is concerned. An example is that of Monero, which not only hides the receiver and sender, but also the amount sent. Bitcoin transactions are publicly visible on the blockchain – you can verify them, but it obscures them in a manner that makes it much harder to track the money.

Regulators Are Paying Attention

This is not under the radar. In many countries, financial regulators have even started to coerce crypto trading platforms to demand additional information from users, as with banks. Coinbase and Kraken are just some of the exchanges which are already conducting full ID verification before they will be allowed to do anything much with your account.

This happens in centralized exchanges, that is, platforms that keep your money and act as an intermediary. When you carry a self-custody wallet, you have no rules to adhere to. Your wallet, your rules. Regulators are yet to discover their way of managing that, and the regulations are highly varied depending on where you live.

Most people turn out to be somewhere in between. You could buy crypto through an exchange that would be required to check your ID, you’d transfer it to your own wallet, and it wouldn’t require any personal details to access it. That type of setup is completely possible, and it is fairly common.

Why This Connects to Internet Speed Too

Here’s something that is not discussed much: running your own Bitcoin node requires more than 600 GB of data and a powerful internet connection – and the size continues to increase.

Speed matters with crypto. Slow internet can be costly, be it switching tokens or gambling in a casino. The more everyday routine is transferred to the blockchain, the faster connectivity will be required. The Internet and crypto are closer than they seem.Online privacy was a geek thing, and now regular people care too. Crypto is a simple solution–at times you simply do not want to present your ID to play a game or purchase something. That clicks with people, and more are doing it each day.

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Carla Schroder

Carla Schroder is a self-taught Linux and Windows sysadmin who laid hands on her first computer around her 37th birthday. Her first PC was a Macintosh LC II. Next came an IBM clone--a 386SX running MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 with a 14-inch color display--which was adequate for many pleasant hours of Doom play. Then around 1997 she discovered Red Hat 5.0 and had a whole new world to explore.

Somewhere along the way she found herself doing freelance consulting for small businesses and home users, supporting both Linux and Windows users and integrating Linux and Windows on the LAN, primarily Linux servers and Windows clients. She is the author of the Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and the Linux Cookbook 2nd Edition for O'Reilly, and has written hundreds of Linux howtos for various publications, .

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