Blackout
Tools · Reading · Seven guides, ten minutes.

Short, blunt, and in order.

How to acquire and hold Monero without a trail, when a Zcash payment is actually shielded, how to buy a number safely, how to run a second account on one machine, and what to do once you have slipped.

01 · 3 min

Acquire and hold Monero without a trail

Monero hides the transaction. It does not hide how the coins got to you, or which address you keep handing out.

  1. 01

    Buy where no name is attached, or break the link once

    A KYC exchange knows it sold you XMR and to which address it withdrew. That is the only public edge in a Monero flow, so either buy peer-to-peer or atomic-swap from another coin, or accept the exchange edge and move the funds once through your own wallet before spending; on-chain the spend is unlinkable.

  2. 02

    Run your own wallet, pick the node deliberately

    Feather or the official GUI/CLI. The remote node you connect to sees your IP and which outputs you ask about; use your own node, Tor, or at least a node you chose rather than a default. Never paste a seed into a web page.

  3. 03

    Never give out your primary address twice

    Addresses that start with 4 are the primary. Anyone who holds it can recognise it anywhere else it appears and can see your public view key. Generate a subaddress (starts with 8) per counterparty; the inspector tells you which kind you are looking at.

  4. 04

    Treat the view key like a password

    A private view key lets its holder see every incoming payment to your wallet, forever. Share it only when you mean to prove receipt. The inspector verifies a view key against an address entirely in your browser, so you can check one before relying on it.

  5. 05

    Mind the ten-block lock

    Fresh outputs cannot be spent for about twenty minutes. If you need to pay for something at a specific moment, fund the wallet earlier. Merchants here settle on one confirmation, so paying is fast; re-spending is not.

  6. 06

    Pay the integrated address exactly as quoted

    An order gives you an integrated address and an amount whose last digits are unique to it. Your wallet tags the payment with the id; on-chain it is indistinguishable from any other transaction. Report the transaction id on the order page; the shop can only see that output, nothing about you.

02 · 3 min

When a Zcash payment is actually shielded

Zcash is private only when both the money you hold and the address you pay are in a shielded pool. Most slips are a t-address.

  1. 01

    Know the four address shapes

    t1 and t3 are transparent: Bitcoin-style, every balance and payment public. zs1 is Sapling shielded. u1 is a unified address that usually carries an Orchard receiver and is what a modern wallet gives you. tex1 forces the sender to pay from transparent funds. Paste any of them into the inspector and it tells you which pool you are in.

  2. 02

    Shield what you buy, immediately

    Exchanges withdraw to transparent addresses. The moment coins land, move them to your own shielded balance (Zashi, Ywallet, Zingo). After that single public hop, your spending is dark. Leave them transparent and every payment you make is a public graph.

  3. 03

    Pay from shielded, even to a transparent address

    A shielded-to-transparent payment ("deshielding") reveals the amount and the receiving address, not the sender. That is how this shop takes ZEC: we publish a t-address so payments can be verified without running a node, and your side stays hidden as long as you pay from a shielded balance.

  4. 04

    Do not reuse a transparent address, ever

    If you must receive on t1 (some exchanges insist), use a fresh one every time and sweep it to shielded. Reused t-addresses link everything that touched them.

  5. 05

    Memos are encrypted, but still yours

    Shielded transactions carry a 512-byte memo only the receiver can read. Useful for an order id; dangerous for anything that identifies you if the receiver is not who you think.

  6. 06

    Confirmations are fast; finality is not instant

    Blocks come every 75 seconds. One confirmation is enough for a shop; wait longer before treating a large inbound payment as settled.

03 · 3 min

Launch a coin without doxxing yourself

The order matters. Most people do the wallet last and the Twitter first, which is backwards.

  1. 01

    Decide what "doxxed" means for you

    Linked to your main X account? Linked to a KYC exchange account? Linked to your real name? Each needs a different amount of effort. Pick the threat before you pick the tools, otherwise you will do too much of one thing and none of another.

  2. 02

    Start from money that is not yours

    The creator wallet must never receive SOL that traces to an exchange account in your name. On this site the burner is paid by a pooled treasury, so this is handled; the SOL you send to the one-time drop address is the only edge. Send it from a wallet whose own history you have checked, not from Coinbase.

  3. 03

    Make the account before the coin, and make it boring

    A fresh X account that posts a contract address in its first hour is obviously a launch account. Give it a week of unrelated, low-effort posts. Use the burner kit for a persona and stick to its voice and its hours. Never follow or interact with your main.

  4. 04

    Every image goes through the scrubber

    Logo, banner, meme, screenshot. Metadata is only half of it: look at what is in the frame. Your taskbar, your bookmarks bar, a notification, the time in the corner, the reflection in a window.

  5. 05

    Every post goes through the scanner

    Especially the pinned one and the bio. Names, places, local time, timezone, other coins you have held. The scanner is a checklist, not a judge; read the flags and decide.

  6. 06

    Launch, then do not touch the burner

    Claim fees through the claim key when you must, to a fresh wallet, and never consolidate that wallet with anything else that is yours. Vanish the drop record when you no longer need it.

04 · 2 min

Buy and use a phone number safely

A number is a key to every account that has it. Treat it like one.

  1. 01

    Know what you are buying

    Virtual numbers come in three kinds: one-shot receive-only (good for one verification, dead after), rented (yours for a period, can receive repeatedly), and ported real SIMs (expensive, most trusted by platforms). X and Telegram increasingly reject the first kind.

  2. 02

    One number, one identity

    Never verify two personas with the same number, and never verify a persona with a number that has ever touched your real name. Platforms link accounts by phone silently.

  3. 03

    Pay like you mean it

    Paying for an anonymous number with a card in your name defeats the purpose. Pay in SOL through a one-time address, as everything here is sold.

  4. 04

    Move 2FA off it immediately

    Once verified, switch the account to an authenticator app you control and remove the phone as a recovery method where the platform allows it. A rented number will be rented to someone else later.

  5. 05

    Never use it for anything real

    Not your bank, not your delivery, not a friend. The moment it appears in a real contact list it is yours.

05 · 2 min

What Solana makes public

Everything, forever, indexed and searchable. Here is the list most people have not thought through.

  1. 01

    Every transfer, both sides, with a timestamp

    Who paid whom, how much, at what second. Block explorers render it in one click; clustering tools render it as a graph.

  2. 02

    Who funded a wallet first

    The first inbound SOL is the strongest link a wallet has. If it came from an exchange, a KYC record is one subpoena away.

  3. 03

    Every token you have ever held

    Token accounts are public. A fresh wallet that immediately buys the same three obscure coins as your main is your main.

  4. 04

    Your hours

    Transaction timestamps across weeks give a sleep schedule, and a sleep schedule gives a longitude.

  5. 05

    Your tools

    Which wallet app, which DEX aggregator, which priority-fee setting. Fingerprints, all of them.

  6. 06

    The creator of every pump.fun coin

    Stored in the bonding curve account. This is why the burner exists: the creator is the burner, the burner is paid by a pool, and the pool is not you.

  7. 07

    What is not public

    Your IP (unless you use a wallet or RPC that logs it; most do), your name (unless an exchange is on the path), and the contents of your head. Keep it that way.

06 · 2 min

Run a second account on one machine

You probably will, so do it in a way that survives one mistake.

  1. 01

    Separate browser profile, minimum

    Not an incognito tab. A full profile with its own cookies, extensions and saved logins. Name it after the persona so you always know which window you are in.

  2. 02

    Different exit

    Your main and your burner should not share an IP in the platform logs. A VPN on the burner profile only, or a residential proxy, is the cheapest version of this.

  3. 03

    Different clock

    Set the burner profile’s timezone override (browser devtools sensors, or an extension) to the persona’s city. Platforms read it from JavaScript.

  4. 04

    Different wallet, different extension

    Never add the burner’s keys to the wallet extension your main uses. Sites can see every account a connected wallet exposes.

  5. 05

    Never cross the streams

    No likes, follows, quotes or replies between the two. No shared images. No copy-pasting a draft from one window to the other, because the clipboard does not know which persona it belongs to.

  6. 06

    When you slip

    Delete the post, do not edit it. Assume it was archived. Decide whether the persona is burned; if it is, retire it rather than rehabilitate it.

07 · 1 min

After you have slipped

Damage control, in the order that actually limits damage.

  1. 01

    Stop posting

    Every post after the slip gives the person who noticed another datapoint. Silence first, thinking second.

  2. 02

    Work out what leaked

    An image with location? A shared wallet? A matching typo? Write it down. The fix depends entirely on which.

  3. 03

    Cut the chain edge if there is one

    If a wallet got linked, stop using every wallet it has touched. Do not try to "clean" funds by moving them; movement is more edges.

  4. 04

    Delete our copy

    Vanish the drop record so there is nothing to compel from us. The chain still has the coin; we no longer have the mapping.

  5. 05

    Retire, do not rehabilitate

    A persona that has been connected to you once stays connected. New persona, new wallet, new number, new hours.