Using zcoin with Phitbone for Anonymous Phone Number Rental
The usage of phone numbers as a medium of verification for anti-spam and identify purposes on websites throughout the web is a growing trend with unsettling consequences in the arena of individual user privacy.
With this unsettling trend, there has been a counter trend of verification-as-a-service providers who provide temporary phone numbers for verification. These solutions are not without their flaws, with most services facing issues in the arenas of user transactional privacy (they have you user card in an easy traceable manner), miss-apportionment (phone numbers are shared between too many participants leading to unintentional banning), and issues in regards to extraneous data (they store request information like name and email).
This does not mean there are no good solutions, Phitbone is a anonymous text verification rental service, covering the three aforementioned flaws, through it’s usage of zcoin as a means for transactional privacy, fair apportionment standards using an hourly rental system, and minimal data collection.
For the uninitiated, zcoin is one of the more mature privacy coins in the space (created in 2016), which takes advantage of a privacy protocol called Sigma, which allows for users to break the transactional links between transactions using a sanitatization process called minting.
The transactional process known in short hand as “Mint. Spend. Repeat” follows as such:
- You can acquire zcoin through a plethora of means, check out the Zcoin website to see some options
- Upon the reception process of zcoin you can anonymize your coins using the Sigma page by inputting the number of coins you’d like anonymize and clicking the mint button (Here’s an awesome guide)
- Once you’ve anonymized your coins, you can use the “Spend” option on the sigma page to send your coins to a recipient with no associated transactional history
In the context of Phitbone, the first step is to head to https://phitbone.com and create an account.
Upon providing your minimal hopefully non-identifying username or password (yes, you can be deanonymized using your password) you will need to attest that you’ll remember your password and that you recognize that without your username and password you will be left without hope of recovery.
Upon entering into your logged in account, you will be able to click the only available option for purchasing a number:
Once you click that button, you will have the option to select the number of hours you will need the number. Don’t worry, if you need to reuse a number after your time has expired, you are free to renew your time on the number if it is available at the time of renewal.
On the purchase page, you will be able to click the payment method option listed zcoin (it’s the only option available outside of USD).
On your zcoin wallet, you will be able to use the spend option on the sigma page, to input the address and send the requisite amount of zcoin to the site.
There will be a slight delay of delivery as the prerequsite number of confirmations is met.
Once you’ve purchased a number you will be able to send and receive messages from the messages tab on Phitbone
You will also be able to renew and purchase additional hours on the service from the Purchase Tab on site
After you have completed all of these steps, congratulations! You now have a number that’s been acquired in a transactionally anonymous manner.
Now this does not mean your purchase is untraceable, there are still a number of potential pitfalls you may face. With one of the key ones being network privacy. Here’s a great guide on using TOR to hide your browsing activity from your ISP, and other nosey individuals.
