On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:
... This is interesting to me personally. How would you run a Tor node anonymously, without breaking the bank?
Apart from offshore incorporation or finding a host that takes cash or anonymous prepaid cards it appears not obvious.
there are a lot who do take anonymous pre-paid cards. i've been using this method for years for servers and other services. purchase the cards with cash or barter. you can load up to $500 without difficulty. you pay a $5 or so fee per card; avoid anything that charges percentages loaded. you have a year to use it, usually, before fees start whittling down the balance. you can register the cards on-line with privacy preserving billing detail. be sure to consider country/state of billing address if this matters for your purchase. (note that Tor is not the only anonymous option for this :) once registered with card holder name, address, use as you would any other Visa/MC/Amex... (there once was a company called CoinStar. they let you feed bills into a kiosk to load cash onto Visa plastic which it spat out right there. you could add currency to an existing card just the same. alas, they had to change their model due to pressures. while it is hard to find prepaid systems this convenient and privacy empowering, they do come round now and then. still, point-of-sale purchase is not so bad compared to the alternatives...)