Still, I feel better using ProtonMail than FastMail, and I consider FastMail to be preferable to gmail.
I also feel better only touching Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook in a private browsing tab. I understand that they can to some extent still use my data to make money for themselves and not share any back with me. I understand that even limiting the data collected in me, I am still subject to nudging, herding, and conditioning - but I hope to impede these actions against me.
I am an author and I rely on social media a few times a year to notify readers of new books, updates, etc. Otherwise I would be happy disconnecting, as I have disconnected from corporate news services.
I often take the effort to convert the URL's to these sites before sharing with others (there are plugins that do this automatically).
Also check https://switching.software
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk_anonymous_remaile...
However the system by which they operate is relatively easy to implement by volunteers. The model is very similar to Tor's onion routing (they're both Chaumian mix networks). I could see middle relays run by volunteers on their Gmail accounts (or whatever) with exit nodes being established addresses specifically for the purpose of being exit nodes.
Exit nodes might require messages be signed by a publicly available key or one registered with the exit node. The sender does need a public key for all the hops. So the final recipient needs to have a key known to the sender.
While spammers could send stuff to people they know public keys for, they wouldn't necessarily be able to send random spam to people.
IIRC in the historical spam problems the sender would make an anonymous (non-crypto) remailer the final recipient so the network would forward the encrypted messages around but the last one would remail the unencrypted message to an included distribution list or listserve or something. Since anonymous remailers aren't a thing anymore that spam vector is closed.
Remailers were an interesting thing a long time ago. Because they work on extant infrastructure I think they could be a cool thing again.
> Bitcoin uses digital signatures (ECDSA) to prove ownership of funds, so sending bitcoins requires the owner of them to digitally sign authorizing the transfer. This transaction is sent to Bitcoin’s public network and later recorded in Bitcoin’s public database (blockchain), so anyone can verify it by checking its digital signature.
If everything is signed and verified to come from a specific account then that's by definition not anonymous. To be anonymous it would need to be the case that no one could figure out who sent the transaction (making the sender of the transaction anonymous), i.e. it couldn't be tied back to any specific account.
Monero makes it impossible to tell what is what and gives people who want to trace money a very hard time doing so.
ZCash uses Zero Knowledge Proofs. A ZK Proof (in this case zkSNARKs) is a way you can prove that you own a key to a second party without a third party being able to tell if there was an actual key involved (it is very easy for two colluding parties to fake a successfull ZK Proof).
IIRC ZCash basically allows you to prove that a transaction has moved money correctly between two accounts without revealing what accounts those are or how much money was transacted. There is knowlegde of how much money is in the shielded pool, ie, all money behind ZK Proofs.
Either approach has different advantages and disadvantages.