Ask HN: What's the best way to have a business anonymously? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best way to have a business anonymously?

13 pointstendto22 comments

I would like to have a business without disclosing the business owner is. Is this possible?

You can create such companies in the Vanuatu Islands and probably in many other places as well. A lawyer will be your registered agent and the only person who knows who you are.

From some quick research it seems you can make an anonymous company in Wyoming and New Mexico as well.

Making an anonymous company in Wyoming and New Mexico permits running the company from these two states but not from a different state, like the state you live in. It requires registering the anonymous company in the state you live in too. This second level of indirection is burdensome enough, for me, to not want to do it.

Free startup idea: register anonymous companies from Wyoming into other states. Like a vpn for company registration.

It would really depend on where you are trying to incorporate. My understanding is this is possible but you will need to pay a lawyer to do all the legal work for you and sign their name on the documents. I doubt this would interfere with most governments finding out who you are unless you are using multiple companies registered in different countries.

Why? Sounds sketchy. You will find it much harder to do business

I want privacy. Privacy isn't a crime. It's possibly a foundation to freedom of speech.

Also thinking of building a private/anonymous messaging service. By this I also mean I want to not know anything about the customer.

I want privacy for me and for the customer.

If you want to start a business and sell stuff to other people, you give up some privacy. Private (anonymous) companies typically do bad things, which is why, as a society, we don't want to work with companies like this.

I appreciate sharing this perspective and I see how typically anonymous companies "did" bad things. You're not the arbitrator of who people want to work with or of the definition of what "as a society" people choose to do.

> You're not the arbitrator of who people want to work with or of the definition of what "as a society" people choose to do.

Obviously, I am just parroting the general opinion for your awareness. We have consumer protection laws for a reason. You are free to be "anonymous" but it's mostly not true (you can easily be found out) and you will find it difficult to do business.

Do you want to have a higher probability for success of your business?

Even if you are the clear owner, your company can be taken away from you.

If not, this would be even more possible, especially if financial prosperity were to arise.

It may not be every day, but there are definitely arbitrators of what they will tolerate before turning "society" either for or against you when you come up on their radar.

Whether you are well identified or not.

Fascinating. Can you share more about this? Do you mean something like government or other entities can take away a company once it becomes intolerable?

Is there any way to protect from this?

You are completely wrong, I wish I could put it nicer. Most businesses have anonymous shareholders, either by design or not. For most companies that you do business with, you have no idea who is the owner or beneficiary. For example if you pumped gas or purchased products at a supermarket.

This isn't true. There are reporting requirements for major shareholders. You can look them up.

Are these reporting requirements not side-stepped anymore by using a company to buy shares?

They can be, but in my experience that isn't the case.

I agree privacy is not a crime. However criminals like privacy, because it defects accountability. Hence, in the public eye, things that are highly private tend to attract criminal behaviour.

This can have the effect of guilt-by-association.

By contrast people do business either people they like. With people they trust. And both qualities require some level of not-anonymous.

Of course i do incidental business with anonymous strangers all the time - like buying gas, but even there the "company is a known entity to me.

If I wanted to use a messaging service that featured my anonymity I would need to trust the provider. Frankly I'd assume the service was being run by a state actor or law enforcement. (That would be true though even if you were public, and not suitably trusted)

Ultimately your service will be very appealing to both privacy-keen people, and criminals. This will result it people assuming that using it = criminal behaviour.

Take bitcoin as an example. Sure there are legitimate uses for it (beyond just speculation.) But the killer app for it is criminal enterprise. Personally if I encountered a service that only took bitcoin, I would assume its either criminal, or a scam or both. That's because bitcoin adds no trust to the situation.

Incidentally I don't believe privacy is a foundation of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech let's you say anything you like. Bur that freedom comes with accountability - in the sense that your words have more power when you put your good-name behind them.

Clearly though privacy and free-speech are very orthogonal -there are plenty of free-speech channels around. Privacy though is more complicated.

(Not least because when you privately communicate with an anonymous someone who ends up being a criminal then you open the door to being complicit etc)

Do you really think criminals won't build private communication systems on their own anyway?

I'm less interested in the public eye and more interested in the private substance.

If I had the option, I'd rather do business with a machine instead of a person or business, if the protocol for doing business can be proven to not need trust. This appears possible only with machines.

It's possible for a messaging service to feature anonymity and privacy and prove the messaging protocol to be trustless.

Whether you want all messaging services to be public and run by known people or not is irrelevant. Anonymous, private messaging is possible, growing and possibly inevitable.

Choosing to have more power in your words with your good-name behind them is exactly this: a choice. Not an obligation.

If you're complicit to a crime, the method of communication being encrypted or not doesn't absolve you from the crime.

I don't disagree with your points. However should your system attract criminals then I eould not use it myself.

Partly because then the chance I'm talking to a criminal goes up, and partly because of reputational damage to me.

In other words, you are focusing on the service itself, and the appeal to non-criminals. I'm focusing on (my projection of) your user base, and my desire to be associated with them.

Good luck with your endeavour.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. If your most gratuitously positive interpretation is that an anonymous and private messaging system will be used only anonymously with no other feature whatsoever, and that people who know each other won't identify themselves to each other as they do in real life should they choose to, and that the majority of the user base will be criminals, and that this business you know little of is a criminal enterprise, then this system isn't for you.

Most companies are anonymous, it's even in the name: SA - Société anonyme

In 2023 most companies are not anonymous and have not been for a long time. You generally have to tell the government the identities of the directors, shareholders and increasingly the ultimate beneficial owners. Often this information is made available to the public.

There are still some countries where you can do that.

wyoming corporations

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