Unknown Fund: Investing and donating to support anonymity
The use cases for anonymity will drive the tech.<p>I'd argue there isn't a middle class use case for strong anonymity. There are tons of use cases for identity and privacy, but anonymity presumes you are being preyed upon somehow. You need antagonists, and most of those are government/institution related, but by defining yourself in opposition to them, you in-effect leave the middle class. E.g. cease to identify as someone those institutions ostensibly serve, and identify instead as one of those they target.<p>To value strong anonymity, you need to be part of either an underclass group, or have enough wealth that it needs protection internationally, with a big gap for use cases in between.<p>There are tons of criminal use cases for anonymity that facilitate the needs and desperation of people afflicted by poverty, but those are illegal precisely because the line between relieving and exploiting poverty is so grey. Lotteries are a great example, as are cash jobs, narco  logistics, vice and sex trade, short term loans, gambling, escrow payments for irregular immigration. These are all things people do for either survival or relief where to facilitate them is exploitative. Arguable, but that's the mainstream view.<p>On the upper end, moving collateral around to protect the "beneficial owner," of an asset like art or property just reduces to variations on tax and regulatory avoidance, or sometimes evasion. It's almost uniquely both high risk and boring.<p>I don't see this fund producing anything interesting.