What you are describing is the tor network.

1. You connect to a guard node which knows who you are
2. The Guard node connects to a middle relay node, and that middle relay only knows who the Guard is, but does not know who you are.
3. If you are going to the standard internet, the relay node connects to an exit node, which knows who the relay operator is, but does not know who the guard node is and does not know who you are.
4. The exit node connects to Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. and only knows that the traffic goes back to the relay node when Amazon or whatever it responds. And then the entire thing goes in reverse back to you.

Now, if you are going to a hidden service and not out to the standard internet, it does this process twice and so you get six hops in between yourself and the hidden service instead of the three to the standard internet.

The SimpleX battery drain issue does not affect everyone. At least for me, it has been perfectly fine.

I don’t text people because texting is not secure. I use the default AOSP app that comes with lineage OS to receive text message codes like those six digit codes but otherwise I only use messengers such as signal

Edit: To stop anybody from saying it, yes, I’m quite aware that getting OTP codes via SMS is not secure, and I do not use it for any account that will let me turn it off entirely. But some, unfortunately, will not. And so I do not trust those accounts very much.

HTTPS doesn’t stop them from knowing what you visited. It just stops them from knowing what you did while you were there. VVPN provider can still see that you visited Google, but they cannot see what you asked for Google to do for you.

If it truly keeps no logs, then it cannot tell what you are doing. But otherwise, a VPN provider can indeed tell what you’re doing because you are only shifting the trust from your internet service provider to your VPN provider. I would highly recommend something like IVPN or Mullvad and only pay for it in Monero. That way, even if logs are kept, you are just a number account to them and they do not have a name for you.

I’m confused. What are you on about? My comment has no screenshots at all.

I have not used Neo Store though i have heard good things. I like droid-ify and have used it in the past.

It will recognize your apps once they get one update and then they will begin auto-updating again like they were. But fdroid itself is increasing its Android versions to catch up. I think it’s targeting Android 10 or 11 now when it was targeting like Android 6.

Having the proof of work defense has been a game changer for the network. I’ve noticed a hell of a lot less unresponsive onion services. However, this is old news as it was released last August. Most everybody should have a version capable of doing the proof of work by now.

Only for those users who do not have proof of work capability, they get put at the back of the line, but anybody with proof of work capability, which was released last August, will do the work and be put higher priority. I know some people who run seed nodes for Haveno-reto and they had major DDOS issues until they got PoW enabled. It was taking like 5 or 10 minutes to get connected to the network. And now it takes about 30 seconds.

If you do end up having to wait until you get a new phone, you could disable Google Play Services and the Google Play Store, and that would help quite a bit.

The way I see it, any step is better than no step at all.

Cool. I was not aware of that

Most have WHOIS privacy. Anybody looking up the domain can see that it’s registered to whichever company you choose but cannot get your direct information from it. Obviously, if you’re under any kind of investigation or something, then the government will just subpoena the domain registrar and ask for your personal information.

Porkbun because they accept crypto. At least to me that is a very important factor

Personally i use proton with my own domain

disable Google Play Services and the Google Play Store. And that will help a lot. And if you still need apps from the Google Store, you can use the Aurora Store from f-droid

Edit: you may also want to look into controld.com since their free dns blocks known malware, ads, and trackers. They have several options including standard DNS, DNS over HTTPS, and DNS over TLS, and Android supports DNS over TLS. So you can use it directly.

Interesting information, although I’m not the one best suited to process it, I would recommend you posting this to something like the skepticism Sunday threads on !monero@monero.town. If it truly has been broken, they are managing to keep it very quiet. And if it has been broken, then there’s a good chance that the vast majority of encryption has also been broken, such as HTTPS.

Then why aren’t they catching more “criminals”? Also, why hasn’t the $600,000 US dollar bounty from the IRS been claimed?

Just makes me want to fight back by helping other people to use Monero, Tor, and other privacy services.