His name is James Stanley. His personal blog is https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/, and it has many good articles about privacy and cryptography applications, such as Tor and IPFS, some has made to the HN homepage. You can obtain such an anonymous physical phone number from his personal service, https://smsprivacy.org/, by paying 0.003 Bitcoin, at the current market price, about ~12-15 USD, per day. Such a high cost can be justified by very nature of a physical phone number.
But I have to say that It's not a complete solution, it has its own limitations. Once a phone number expires, it just expires, and I don't think you can get your previous number back retroactively... So it can only be used as a workaround for verification code to register your account. If the service decides to issue a SMS challenge to you in the future, you'll have my Facebook problem, as I mentioned in the comment section.
Perhaps I can write to him to see whether he can implement a solution for this problem.
I don't personally know him, I'm just a reader in the field of security and privacy, and he happens to have a nice blog and an interesting service.
> I very much dislike the privacy aspect of the whole phonenumber game and also the environmental impact of burner use.
Then, you should also care about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency, Proof-of-work literally works by burning the energy, and in order the secure the network, it must burn as much energy as currently available for general computing.
I personally don't have problem with it, as I think a global consensus mechanism is genuinely expensive, and merely using it does not directly contribute to its energy use, but I acknowledge that criticisms based on the environmental ground has a strong and valid point. Perhaps for you, using a burner phone is still a better option for your philosophy?
Meanwhile, looking forword to GNU/Taler, an PayPal-like anonymous payment system, which is not a currency, so it doesn't need to burn energy.
But I have to say that It's not a complete solution, it has its own limitations. Once a phone number expires, it just expires, and I don't think you can get your previous number back retroactively... So it can only be used as a workaround for verification code to register your account. If the service decides to issue a SMS challenge to you in the future, you'll have my Facebook problem, as I mentioned in the comment section.
Perhaps I can write to him to see whether he can implement a solution for this problem.
I don't personally know him, I'm just a reader in the field of security and privacy, and he happens to have a nice blog and an interesting service.
> I very much dislike the privacy aspect of the whole phonenumber game and also the environmental impact of burner use.
Then, you should also care about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency, Proof-of-work literally works by burning the energy, and in order the secure the network, it must burn as much energy as currently available for general computing.
I personally don't have problem with it, as I think a global consensus mechanism is genuinely expensive, and merely using it does not directly contribute to its energy use, but I acknowledge that criticisms based on the environmental ground has a strong and valid point. Perhaps for you, using a burner phone is still a better option for your philosophy?
Meanwhile, looking forword to GNU/Taler, an PayPal-like anonymous payment system, which is not a currency, so it doesn't need to burn energy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312