Aren’t they still using centrally assigned Validators?

On a bit of investigation, they run a small number and have endorsed some, but there’s many more that you could tell your own node or validator to trust. What the exact interconnection is it’s hard to say from just some searching.

The lower computing requirements come from no mining, and no by-default storage of irrelevant historical data. A bank account with only one “node” and no internal network communications going back and forth would be a lot leaner yet, though, so it’s not the exact same thing.

For your network traffic, are you bouncing it through an onion route for which the peers aren’t required to save records - like Tor?

Yep, exactly. There’s no real substitute for it if you want to use the same internet as everyone else.

It’s cool that my instance let me sign up with just an essay instead of going through all the hoops you usually have to, although we’re unsurprisingly having the start of a spam problem.

Honestly I don’t recognize your username, but since you’re privacy focused I assume you just change it. It’s been a long time. ❤️

I do, and it has, but I hate to say I can’t be sure we met. When I started out it was small and obscure but not name-basis small.