I found a security vulnerability in SMS Privacy this morning
Mon 7 August 2017
I woke up this morning to find an email from my SMS Privacy server
informing me about an error: Read more
Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people
Fri 16 June 2017
I was looking on the DuckDuckGo search results for "anonymous bitcoin sms" today, just to see what was out there.
My SMS Privacy was the top result, as expected. But the second result
was new to me: Read more
I started accepting 0-conf Bitcoin payments, and it was great
Wed 29 March 2017
Customers of SMS Privacy have been frustrated with long
confirmation times for Bitcoin payments. Even though I only required 1 confirmation, it can still
take a long time for that first confirmation if the transaction was accidentally sent with a fee that
is too low. Instead of sending money and being able to use the service immediately, customers sometimes had
to wait hours. This is immensely frustrating for a legitimate customer: you've sent the money, you're
not trying to steal anything, why do you have to wait? Read more
SMS Privacy was attacked last night
Sat 25 February 2017
This morning I checked on the list of SMS Privacy user accounts, as I do every morning, and found that
quite a large number had been created overnight, between 22:48 and 23:10 GMT on 24th of Feb 2017. Most of them had names like: Read more
Precautions for generating Bitcoin QR codes
Wed 15 February 2017
A couple of people have been asking me to add QR codes to the payment page on SMS Privacy.
I'd been putting it off for a while because I didn't want to do it in a way that opens up avenues for exploitation. Read more
How (and why) to accept Bitcoin payments yourself (without running a full node)
Fri 11 November 2016
Accepting Bitcoin payments for an online service can be daunting at first
(I worked out how to do it, for SMS Privacy,
a couple of months ago). What I describe is not the only way to accept Bitcoin payments - it's not even the
best way to accept Bitcoin payments - but it works for me. And it might work for you, too. Read more
SMS Privacy month 1 review
Mon 10 October 2016
It's a month since I launched SMS Privacy, a web service
offering anonymous phone numbers paid in Bitcoin. This is what's happened
over the last month... Read more
SMS Privacy now provides anonymous voicemail
Mon 19 September 2016
One of the use cases that inspired me to create SMS Privacy is signing up for
accounts for online services without having to link that to a real-world identity. Unfortunately,
it turned out that my API provider is blocking the verification codes that many of
these services send, in an effort to prevent people from abusing their API to automate
the bulk creation of accounts. Read more
The SMS Privacy conversion funnel
Mon 12 September 2016
I'm a big fan of Patrick McKenzie's blog.
If you're interested in small-time software business it's worth working through
his greatest hits page. A powerful
idea I learnt from his site is the conversion funnel: all the visitors to your site pour into
the top, they then pass through several filter layers, and some proportion of them pop out at the bottom as paying customers. To
get more paying customers you either need to put more users in the top, or get a higher proportion of
them to pop out at the bottom. Read more
How to buy phone numbers anonymously
Sat 10 September 2016
Over the last week or so I've been working on a project that allows anyone to
buy phone numbers using Bitcoin anonymously, and use them to send and receive
SMS. I think this is an important piece of the puzzle of allowing people to
interact with the world anonymously, as a large number of services use
SMS for account verification or 2-factor-authentication.
Being able to buy phone numbers anonymously allows you to create new identities
more easily. Read more