CHAPTER III

WHY AND HOW TO USE AN ALIAS

Most of us already use an alias in our Internet communications. Truck drivers and users of the Citizen’s Band (CB) radio have been using “handles” or aliases for many years as well. Most of us have nicknames, my point is that just because you are using an “alias”, it doesn’t mean you are involved in some type of crime. An alias is one of the best ways to preserve your personal and financial security.

I remember meeting with someone a couple of years ago. At our first meeting, I used an alias and when we finally sat down to discuss some things, he stated, as if it was a normal thing to do, that he could not find any information about me online. I explained that I don’t publish information about myself on the Internet. What ever happened to talking with someone in order to get to know him? Why do we think it’s okay to investigate people outside of just working with them and talking with them and getting to know them first?

In the “Assessment” stage, you successfully created a “Nominee”. Now that you have a basic structure, mailing address, fictitious name and bank account, you can begin using it for services such as utilities, Internet and other benefits such as coupon clubs and local memberships. This can be difficult sometimes, most services require your name and social security number and date of birth because they want this information if you ever owe them money and they need to use it to collect against you.

If you take your “persona” to the next level and create a credit file for it, it’s then fairly easy to open home utility and other service accounts in the fictitious name and it’s nine-digit credit file number (with created date of birth). There is a nice service that can do this for you online, as you will read later in this book.

Once you go to this level, you may want to create an entire online personality, including facebook and twitter accounts under this fictitious personality. Remember that you own this online personality and have the same rights over the retention of this information as you do for yourself, it is your alias, you must manage it the same way you should be managing your legal name or even your other property and possessions.

Just like you don’t really discuss your own income or net worth with just anyone, or even friends or some family members, there is other information that is entirely unnecessary to share with other people, especially strangers. It’s the same habit we teach our children, don’t talk to strangers, but as adults we ignore it. Just because someone works for a corporation and says it’s their policy to require certain information form you, doesn’t mean you always have to step in line and give it. You have choices and options.

Be cautious of people, even employees of companies you might hire, asking for your legal name and date of birth. This means they are usually going to check your credit file, even if the person asking for the information says they are not. The same is true if they ask for your social security number. You can use a nominee or fictitious name for privacy in cases such as opening utility accounts. I’ll explain this in more detail after the following section.

A good lesson and probably the first in martial arts about winning a fight is first, avoid the fight. You can win against anyone wanting to sue you personally by tricking them with their own system into believing or acting as if you cannot be served with a summons and complaint. The summary of it is that you take the same steps that one would take when moving, file a change of address with the post office, apply for a mortgage or lease agreement at the destination address, etc. This will result in your credit file being modified to make it appear as if you’ve moved. What happens then is any attorney for a party wanting to sue you will be assigned the case in that jurisdiction. The steps taken to serve process will result in the failure of service of process. That means that the court will never obtain jurisdiction, even if the attorney obtains permission from the court to service process by publication and the plaintiff gets a default judgment, it will not attach to any of your property or result in a wage garnishment or bank levy; however, if the creditor ever does get a default judgment and attach property, the judgment is easily set aside for jurisdictional reasons. The jurisdiction should be changed to a state that does not permit wage garnishments.

This step involves a little time and preparation. The earlier you complete this, the better your chances will be of avoiding a lawsuit. The standard method of determining which law firm or attorney will be chosen to file suit against you is based upon your mailing address. It is assumed by the collections department and the law firm that your mailing address is your place of residence. Since the bank must file suit in the county in which you reside, it must then locate a law firm that is local to this mailing address.

If the collection department sees that you reside in Phoenix for example, it will assign the collection to a law firm located in Phoenix. Remember that you originally confirmed that they had the correct address for you when your account was opened. This is information that you provide, and when you move to a different address, you can easily complete a change of address form and include that with your monthly payment. What if you submitted a change of address form with an address several states away from where you truly reside and arranged to have your mail forwarded to you every two weeks? Would any creditor know the difference?

Provided that you would ultimately receive all mail, or that you pay your bills online so that this would not be a factor, probably no one would notice. In fact, if your account did go to collections, upon deciding to file suit, that department would attempt to locate a local law firm near your mailing address, which is several states away from where you truly reside. What do you think your chances of being sued would be at that point? There is a chance that the bank would have archived a history of previous mailing addresses and be able to try the next most recent address or may retrieve a copy of your credit file and see if they can find your previous address that way. This can be countered by simply disputing your true residential address on your credit file and claiming it is incorrect. You can show copies of monthly statements to prove this. You can also make the change of address twice so that assuming the creditor retains only one previous address for you; it will be replaced when the second change of address is entered into your customer record.

What if you sent the bank a change of address notice with an address in an area of the United States that had a population less than four thousand people in one county? Your chances of being sued by a local law firm would be dramatically reduced. The best choice for a destination address is in one of the four states that do not permit wage garnishment, that way the creditor is not so motivated to continue looking for you. These are North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Pennsylvania.

You are probably thinking that “ducking and hiding” is the solution to your debt problems. This is absolutely not true. The method explained here has been used by many wise and learned estate-planning attorneys. It is the same strategy used by famous people who want to avoid the press and public scrutiny.

Your mailbox address should, of course, be in a different state. You can complete the change of address notification for each credit card account to which you wish to apply these strategies. The mail they send you can then be automatically forwarded to your local address for response.

Some of you will ask, “What happens if I do this and they sue me anyway?” You cannot be sued until service of process is perfected, and in nearly every jurisdiction (county and state), that requires personal service by a licensed process server. Rarely are creditor lawsuits of this type permitted to be served by publication or mail. Assuming the worst case, that process can be made by mail or publication, and that the plaintiff’s attorney has obtained permission from the court to do that, you will always file in every example, a motion to dismiss for improper service of process. Either way, one of the conditions of obtaining jurisdiction is that the complaint must allege that you were or are a resident of that state at the time the complaint is filed and served, or during the time involved in the facts of the case. An affidavit will overcome this presumption. There are thousands of test cases using this method that have been completely successful without one record of any exceptions.

Keeping this in mind, realize that your personal credit file is one of the biggest security risks you have. Just think about when you open a utility account, such as with your power company, or cable or even your mobile telephone service. You might give them a mailing address to send bills to, but they will always have the service address on file. If your legal name is associated with this, some people have the knowledge of how to get that information. What you want to do is open the account with no social security number and not in your legal name. I don’t even recommend using a business, it’s just as effective to use a fictitious name and make a tiny deposit in lieu of allowing them access to your credit file.

Nominees & Fictitious Names

A nominee is a person or firm to whom securities or other properties are transferred to facilitate transactions, while leaving the customer as the actual owner. If you want privacy in banking, you can have an accountant be the signer for your corporation and name him or her as the nominee in the operating agreement or articles of association. You can require a security bond through an insurance company in order to protect the account against unauthorized uses.

A fictitious name (or DBA for “doing business as”) can used used for similar purposes. It can either be registered with the state or not, depending on what your objectives include. Sometimes you want people to associate a certain name with a certain activity and other times you may not want a name to be connected to a particular activity.

Using a fictitious name is not fraudulent in itself, even if someone claims that there is a presumption of fraud; however, if used in the commission of fraud, it would be an element in that crime. Just be forthright in your activities and keep your word and you’ll get all the benefits of some privacy without the costs of establishing a new corporation.

A fictitious name can used used for branding or you can manage separate business organizations under the same corporate structure. It can help organize your account, maybe you can have a separate balance sheet and income statement for each joint venture, each asset or each advertising campaign.

Remailing Services

A re-mailing service allows you to send and receive mail as if you are physically located in a place other than where you reside, even in a foreign country. You can make it appear as if your business office is in London and mail can be sent there, the staff opens it for you, faxes or re-mails it back to your real location and when you want to have mail sent from that location, the re-mailing service will repackage your mail for you.

Attorney-Client Privilege

Imagine what kind of privacy you can have receiving mail addressed to a fictitious name at your attorney’s office in exchange for a small comparable monthly fee or as a free bonus part of his retainer.

Imagine having tax returns prepared by an accounting firm working through your attorney’s retainer. The only item that could be discussed at an audit would be the actual tax return you filed, not even any communications you had in preparing it. All of your records and conversations would be protected under the attorney client privilege, not to mention the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Trustee as Nominee

I will need to explain a few more things about Bitcoin before I can explain how to use a trustee and what type of trustee.

The reason why at least I’m an advocate of Bitcoin is because it’s a gateway to privacy without trying to bargain with our legislators. The terms “laundering” and “smuggling” are misnomers and only used to promote drama in the subject. These activities are illegal but what’s interesting is that the “system” from which we can our privacy considers any privacy you want to be the result of laundering or smuggling money. We have rights to privacy, and these rights are absolute, they existed before any government, they exist because we are people and have a conscience, and we are beings of reason.

Taking back your privacy is a vote for privacy and liberty and freedom and it’s a vote against a government system that has lost its way and has become a monstrosity instead of a protector of our rights. We have to protect our own rights.

In July, we will witness a change in the way Bitcoin is priced because of a change in the mining rewards.

In the Bitcoin network, user transactions are grouped in blocks and recorded to a digital public ledger called a blockchain. Miners are in charge of this task, and receive a mining reward in the form of bitcoins for each block recorded.

The amount of bitcoins rewarded for each block decreases with time: it is halved every 4 years. This event, the moment when the mining reward is divided by 2, is commonly called “Bitcoin halving”. Other denominations are used: “reward drop”, “reward halving”, or simply “the halving” or “the Halvening” which is a popular meme among bitcoiners.

When Bitcoin was created in 2009, the initial reward was 50 bitcoins. In November 2012, it dropped to 25btc after the first halving. The second halving will take place in July 2016, decreasing the reward to 12.5btc

Visit this website for more information, http://www.thehalvening.com/

Vault Exchanges

This is a very simple technique for moving money to foreign jurisdictions. When you have precious metals in your possession and you want to move them out of the country, for example, you can exchange them for Bitcoins in the originating jurisdiction and then use those Bitcoins without minutes to buy an equivalent amount of precious metals in your foreign vault service.

Elemetal Vault services works with Provident Metals to provide a vault storage service for people who want to store precious metals in a third party vault service. I see no indication that you can exchange your precious metals for Bitcoin but I think it would be very easy to arrange, especially because Provident Metals accepts Bitcoin.

There are other services of course, but I have to explain the details about Bullion Star.

Bullion in Singapore

Singapore is simply the best country in the world to buy and store bullion.

Singapore is the free-trade capital of the world and has a solid reputation in terms of property rights protection and ease of doing business. These conditions together with below mentioned advantages makes Singapore the ideal location for storing precious metals.

Tax-Free – There is no tax for bullion whatsoever in Singapore. No GST/VAT/Sales tax and no capital gains tax.

No Reporting Requirements – There are no domestic or international reporting requirements for buying, selling or storing gold in Singapore. No permits are necessary to import or export investment precious metals.

Cash Allowed – Cash makes sense. There is no counter party risk involved for cash and carry. If you settle in cash, you don’t have to place any trust in anyone. You get the bullion, we get the cash.

Safety & Security – The crime rate in Singapore is among the lowest in the world. Violent crime is almost unheard of. There’s a strong rule of law in Singapore. You can take physical possession and walk out with your precious metals without any problem.

Property Ownership Rights – Singapore is politically stable with strong property ownership rights protection.

Business Climate – Singapore consistently ranks top three globally in business climate reports measuring how easy and straightforward it is to conduct business in different countries.

Laws and Regulations – While governments in the EU and the USA try to curb investments into precious metals by introducing legislation that makes it difficult to purchase precious metals, the government of Singapore is dedicated to transform Singapore into a trading hub for precious metals. The Singaporean government encourages bullion dealers and refineries to set up their business in Singapore with the objective of increasing Singapore’s share of the global gold market from the present 2 % of global gold trade to 10 % by 2020.

Independence from the EU & USA – Singapore has no jurisdictional ties to the US or any country in Europe. Singapore is proud of its independence. BullionStar.com is just one vault service that you will want to research for this country.

Cold Storage

Any Bitcoins stored online will be vulnerable to hackers and security compromises and any online wallet provider who claims that its wallets are 100% hackproof is simply lying. Hackers are smart, technologically advanced, proficient and fiercely determined. Inputs.io was recently hacked for over 6400 bitcoins, and BitFloor was put out of business by hackers. However, hackers cannot steal Bitcoins that are stored offline in ‘cold storage’ encrypted containers.

I’m not promoting bitkee.com specifically, but I really do like the product and my research indicates that it is a reliable tool that will get you the protection and security you want with your Bitcoins. There are competing services and you will discover them with your research.

A paper wallet is a mechanism for storing bitcoins offline as a physical document. It can have all the necessary information to send and receive bitcoins without relying on a computer for storage and use.

You can use www.bitaddress.org or www.bitcoinpaperwallet.com to generate your own private paper wallet address and use these wallets to store your bitcoin on a paper document in a safe or other secure location.

Paper wallets are typically created by printing a newly generated public key and private key onto paper. When good security practices are followed paper wallets are one of the safest ways to store bitcoins physically and offline.

A bitkee is durable, fireproof, waterproof, corrosion resistant and invulnerable to software and hardware crashes. Specific precautions are taken to eliminate security risks when printing a bitkee. These wallets are produced in a Faraday cage, with very strict hard-drive destruction and security protocols. An example of a Faraday cage is your microwave, it will nearly block all frequencies to electronic devices, it’s not perfect and you can make your own with a greater degree of security, but this is a good example. Other examples include copper mesh wallets for your credit cards.

One other way to store Bitcoin and any other data is on a device such as a USB Drive or an SD card that has its own operating system installed. You would be able to keep this device on your key chain for example and “boot to it” on any computer and operate from it as if it’s your own computer using someone else’s monitor, mother board and keyboard, You will want to look into installing the free version of the Tails operating system or Linux on your USB Drive or SD card for this purpose.

Dark Laundering

The ability to buy large volumes of Bitcoin at one time is limited with most of the exchanges; however, https://darklaunder.com/ is one of those services that allow you to buy an unlimited amount of Bitcoins each day. This is a Bitcoin “tumbler” or “mixer”.

Once you get your volumes of money into Bitcoin, you can then free to use more services to increase your privacy. Here are some examples.

One of the main benefits of Bitcoin is the safety of its transactions. It is not regulated or managed by any government or banking institution; it is impossible to do so thanks to the nature of its design. Bitcoin is a completely secure and easy means of transferring money throughout the world. It is also very cheap to perform international payments with Bitcoin as credit cards charge commissions for every transaction that takes place.

You will want to do further research using these key phrases: “Dark Wallet” and “Dark Launder” along with https://www.darkwallet.is/.

Darkwallet is a community of projects developing a wallet with privacy, scalability and integrity. We see Bitcoin fundamentally as a new tool of business and trade in the free economy, more than a mere payments innovation.

The Darkwallet is our first step into a series of products that will touch upon tools for markets, governance and organization. These are tools we need for our own communities, where we aim to create self-managed spaces.

You will also want to review http://samouraiwallet.com/

Using Bitcoin Casinos To Launder Bitcoin

Bitcoin casinos essentially “clean” coins and you don’t even need to put in much effort. You can deposit “dirty” coins, play for a bit, withdraw your coins from the casinos, and voila! You’ve received bitcoins that have been transferred several times.

Laundering bitcoin works and using bitcoin casinos to do that is only one of the many ways to launder. If you do it correctly, there isn’t much anyone do about it. It will always be a game of cat and mouse.

Here is a rating schedule of different Bitcoin casinos: https://bitcoincasinos.reviews/

Multi-signature Key Storage

Imagine using two or three signatures (or authorizations) to access your Bitcoin wallet.

Standard Bitcoin transactions only require one signature, from the owner of the private key associated with the Bitcoin address. However, the Bitcoin network supports much more complicated transactions, which require multiple signatures to authorize.

Bitcoin multi-signature addresses can have up to 15 associated private keys, although the most common is 3. The idea is that Bitcoins become “encumbered,” requiring the cooperation of separate parties in order to do anything with them. In a typical multisig situation, 2 out of 3 key holders need to authorize a transaction.

While a multisig wallet may not be the best choice for every bitcoin user, there simply isn’t a substitute when security is the primary concern. They let 2 people from the same business complete a third-party payment; one person generates a transaction while a second authorizes the payment. They also allow individual users to implement two-factor authentication, where one key is on your primary computer and a second is on your smartphone, so the funds cannot be spent without a signature from both devices.

P2SH.info keeps track of the number of bitcoins being held in ‘pay to script hash’ addresses, which account for most of the multi-signature addresses is use. According to the service, about 10 percent of all bitcoins are currently being held in multi-signature wallets, or 1.5 Million bitcoins today.

This means that only 10 percent of all existing bitcoins, at most, are being secured as well as they could be. If you’ve got a large stash of coins, and aren’t one of those 10 percent, it may be time for you to pick one of the many wallets that provide multisig security.

The following 13 wallets are the only ones we could find today that offer multi-signature addresses, and still appear to be supported. All have differing features, as they seem to solve slightly different problems, so it’s worth taking your time when choosing one.

Armory and mSigna assume that you aren’t as safe as you can be without a local copy of the whole blockchain. While this is true for a very specific type of attack, it’s over 50 Gigabytes in size, and keeping it up to date means running the local machine 24/7. Other wallet makers vary in how they remotely sign transactions, while some don’t sign it at all, giving you all of the keys. Each of these differences need to be carefully considered.

armoryArmory is the original high-security wallet, developed way back in mid-2011. It has many unique options, but they can be more than a little overbearing for new users. It requires a local copy of the blockchain to be on the same machine, and it specializes in splitting your wallet in two. The ‘watch-only’ wallet has no private keys inside it, while the ‘cold wallet’ is intended to live on a different computer that never goes online.

There is no web portal nor signing service with Armory, but the wallet can be configured with up to 7 keys. It’s also the only wallet here to help you make paper wallets, for storing your coins totally on paper, even multiple pieces of paper for multi-signature wallets.

BitaloBitalo is a web-only wallet, and one of the least-known services on this list. Its lack of an open-source software client likely scares away quite a few of the security purists, but it comes with a full suite of adjoined services like an exchange, marketplace, classifieds, mining pool, and even a prediction market – which are all integrated with your wallet service on their site.

Bitalo allows for an optional 2-factor authentication, but if you don’t turn it on you won’t have any way for them to sign their key for you, so it’s a necessity when dealing with multiple keys.

bitgoBitGo is one of the very largest wallet providers no matter how you measure. They also offer free insurance to all users in case of a hack.

You may find yourself using a BitGo wallet without even knowing it, as they are the only wallet on this list that integrates into third-party bitcoin exchanges and other financial services.

Block ioBlock.io is a simple web-only wallet that also holds a few other altcoins like Doge and Litecoin, and has a very well-developed API for programmers. Unfortunately, they don’t offer an open source client, nor allow you to generate your own private keys locally.

Block.io uses ‘Green Addressing,’ which is a way to build up a sort of white list for familiar bitcoin addresses, which will save you money on transaction fees if you’re a repeat sender. Although nothing has been proven wrong about this practice, there have been many criticisms about green addressing over the years, and some point to the fact that many services in the past that used it, including Mt.Gox, are now out of business.

blocktrailBlocktrail is a popular mobile wallet with a pretty, open source phone app that keeps one key and gives you two, so you can back one up off the phone and have full control when you need it. Two-factor authentication is optional.

When it’s time to spend some coins on Blocktrail, it sends your one signed key and then a password to them that unlocks your encrypted key that they’re holding onto, on the server, just for the one spend. That way they never really have any of your keys, but they hold onto one that is encrypted from them. This can be very secure but it relies on you remembering a password for this extra layer of security.

The most popular wallet on the list by far, Coinbase is more than a wallet service, it’s like a bank and exchange all rolled into one, with local websites and bank connections in 30 countries worldwide.

There is no such thing as anonymity while using Coinbase, and their client code is not open source in any way. They normally offer Insurance to their customers, but in the case of Multisignature “vaults” as they call them, they don’t offer insurance anymore because they don’t have full control over your coins that way. They do offer some interesting combinations for their multisignature addresses though, up to 3-of-6 with a variety of options for two-factor authentication on top of that.

The best reason to use Coinbase would be for the convenience of using their Shift debit card, but it does not appear that the Shift card will spend coins from a multisignature vault, only a normal wallet inside your Coinbase account.

Coinkite is a unique wallet in that it has the most options to experiment with, a powerful API and even tools and hardware for merchants. Starting with their ability to go all the way up to a 15-of-15 multisignature wallet, to integration with the Ledger hardware wallet, you can make a very safe and full-featured wallet with Coinkite.

It’s only a web-based wallet, but the helpful company built around it and numerous options on their website make it seem like a full enterprise solution, even just for an individual’s wallet.

Copay is a simple but very well-built wallet, that is available on many different platforms. It was developed specifically for multisignature use by the BitPay development team, and you can build and use up to 6-of-6 address wallets. They’ve even integrated the Trezor and Ledger hardware into Copay already.

They have added secure payment verification to these sleek little wallets, so especially while moving your funds, there is less reason to fear losing them by sending them to the wrong address.

Electrum is the most popular desktop-only wallet and the first to use Simple Payment Verification (SPV) as described by Satoshi in his whitepaper. That means that it only downloads the header for each block, which doesn’t take long at all, so it’s more secure than a web wallet while being almost as fast to use.

This high-privacy wallet has a reputation as the wallet of choice for the dark web, and has been constantly developed since 2011. It has the most hardware wallets integrated of all wallets, and it’s enjoyed a huge following ever since before it was included as the standard privacy wallet on all Tails installs.

It’s also the only desktop-only client software that uses a 3rd-party service for key signing. TrustedCoin is a service provider that has been integrated into the software so that you can optionally choose a specific but powerful level of security. They call this two-factor authorization, but it’s actually an instance of a 2-of-3 key multisignature wallet where TrustedCoin holds the 3rd key, you hold the other two, and they charge you a tiny fee to spend with them each time.

GreenAddress is a popular wallet that has some great features that no one else has picked up yet. For starters, it’s got the widest array of customizable ‘triggers,’ which tell the software when it’s ok to sign your transaction with their remote key. It’s also the only wallet that has been developed for every major platform, so it’s optimized for whatever device you’re using now.

As their name implies, they use green addresses to help save on your transaction fee costs. That can be a mixed blessing, but so far this wallet is building up quite a following and has even spun off a colored-coin wallet called GreenBits. With hardware support for both the Ledger and the Trezor, no other multisig wallets come as well-rounded as this one does.

mSIGNA is the other ‘old school’ desktop-only wallet that uses a local blockchain, much like Armory does. It lets you make up to 8-of-8 key multisignature wallets though. Unlike Armory, you can generate a seed phrase to backup your wallet in a different way if needed.

The local blockchain appears to be an optional setting however, and in stark contrast to Armory, opening up the mSIGNA client can be a very speedy for a local software client.

Huobi’s QuickWallet is mainly only popular in China, but offers an English version that has some strong features. This web-only wallet doesn’t appear to have made its code open-source anywhere, although it may have been programmed in Chinese and simply hard to find.

It’s the only wallet here that requires using Google Authenticator in order to have their key sign your transactions, which makes the service less anonymous because Google needs a phone number for that service.

Finally, Xapo is another popular bitcoin bank similar to Coinbase, and therefore needs your full identification. Xapo is, however, one of only two on our list that offers insurance on a multisignature wallet account.

There are many different trigger choices for initiating a spend, but multisig wallets are limited to only 2-of-3 keys. A Xapo debit card is also available, like Coinbases’ Shift card, but it can’t be shipped to US residents.