Exactly. Anyonymous payment however would be bad. And currently, with e.g. bitcoin scramblers, we are getting there.
I can see no harm in anonymous data exchange (except copyright infringement) on an open society. But if you can order whatever you want online anonymously -- that could result in some deplorable stuff.
(That's why I think bitcoins will get shut down entirely by goverments at some point)
Except that's still traceable. It makes it a pain in the ass, sure, but any point where you need to deal with an exchange to get money out is a point where you lose your anonymity. So it's fair to say "Bitcoin can be anonymous IF you have a way to get bitcoins without exchanging dollars for bitcoins, and IF you're only exchanging said BTC for non-physical goods that don't need to be shipped somewhere", but that's about it.
Fair enough. But you use your own address and name to deliver stuff from the internet. Where is the anonymity in that? Or i am missing something?
Also... you get your cash from CC and transfer it to BTC, you pay someone else, you encourage money laundering because that seller doesn't have to pay any tax for that.
For me the most important factor is where the cash is going. IF we all switch to bitcoin and government can't keep track of the money, big criminals, bit corps will never pay any taxes, and how we are going to have free schools, free medical care, police, etc? Am I over thinking this?
Privacy is important but either we have to find a way to change the economy as it is, or regulate BTC properly.
Just because someone has a fetish and wants to keep it "anonymous" is not enough for me.
Bitcoin "solves" the problem of anonymous payments, but with copyright and other liability, never mind asymmetrical connections, would probably make this unappealing to providers.
This is interesting, I'm all for bitcoin, but I think if I am meeting someone over the internet, I'd like at least some part of the process to not be anonymous.
I know that doesn't necessarily make me safe, but it is one more step.
You have a way to buy things anonymously right now, it's called Bitcoin. If you mean a low-fee and frictionless way, it's unclear why that would ever develop. Unless everything you earn and do is anonymous, it seems to me that the transition between the anonymous store of value and your real identity (address, bank acct) will involve friction and cost.
It would be anonymous if you used something like Zcash. Now the current craze is happening over Ethereum so it's pseudo-anonymous at best. And for sure many governments have tools for linking accounts and transactions together by now.
At some point, you'll have to make a payment to someone who doesn't accept Bitcoin, which is the point of failure. While cash may be anonymous and Bitcoin may be anonymous (the second one is dangerous, in and of itself), you will have to make a conversion to real-world currency and that transaction can be as heavily regulated, including the requirement for non-anonymity.
And if you stick to Bitcoin transactions only, it would be very easy for authorities to declare tax-evasion, for starters, which opens up a whole different can of worms, as transactions are occurring in a non-regulated space.
On the whole, it seems like Bitcoin-enthusiasts would be far safer in a more regulated environment.
Indeed. This is why a digital currency is only viable if you have the ability to make anonymous third party transactions. Until then, I remain a hard no. But even bitcoin doesn't truly offer that.
True but cryptocurrency is not particularly anonymous once you're buying physical goods that need to be shipped to an individual. Imagine how useful the blockchain would be to Amazon if they knew the addresses of all their customers wallets (which they would surely collect) and the addresses of all their competitors wallets. They could see where their customers shop and micro-target deals.
I like the GNU Taler model mentioned in the article where the payer decides whether they want to be identified, but the payee is always identifiable. Combine this with a crypto-signed receipt from the payee and you have a system that better respects privacy.
With careful precautions, Bitcoin can, I'm sure, be used anonymously. (Mine the coins yourself, connect to the network using TOR, never use your computer for anything else, be paranoid, never pay for a transaction that could be linked to you, etc).
By this argument, credit cards can be used anonymously too. But everyone isn't going around saying that credit cards are anonymous.
If, sometime in future, Bitcoin happened to be commonly used for online commerce, by casual, semi technical users, then, with the system as its currently implemented in clients, most of most peoples transactions are going to be very obviously linked to other transactions that are linked to their real identities.
If, as the implementation currently stands, casual users were doing their Amazon.com shopping using Bitcoin, Bitcoin probably wouldn't look very anonymous to Amazon at all.
I can only guess how anonymous it looks to Mt Gox.
In general maybe, but if you were selling something online and received bitcoin on a wallet not associated with your irl identity you can be anonymous, its just not practical because you need to de-anonymize to get that into actual cash unless you really know what you are doing.
It's really important to understand that bitcoin is not anonymous by default, and it might well be less anonymous than cash by default. I know there are solutions to anonymizing BTC, but for the average person who bought some BTC from a service online and used it to send a transaction to a political campaign or TPB or wherever, I wouldn't call it any more anonymous than paypal.
Hypothetically someone steals a lot of money from somebody else, if the amount is large enough the victim may be willing to do a lot of detective work in order to trace the funds.
This detective work might include...
* Blockchain analysis
* Offering money to bitcoin mixers in return for information
* Traditional private investigation
Cash has the same problem, bills can be tracked if the parties involved are motivated enough. Cash does go a long way to providing privacy though, for example in days gone by a husband might have bought a pornographic magazine with cash and the wife would be unaware.
This will annoy the libertarian crowd, but a truly anonymous and untraceable medium of exchange is not only most likely impossible, but also undesirable. The failed war on drugs aside, a lot of the things people want to do completely anonymously are illegal for good reasons (CP, human trafficking, etc).
It remains to be seen if bitcoin can offer the same kind of privacy that cash does, if bitcoin adoption continues I expect blockchain analysis to become very sophisticated.
Bitcoin payments are anonymous, but they are perfectly traceable. Quite the important distinction there.
Tainted money like that would need to be put through a Bitcoin tumbler which is unsafe and imperfect or only ever used to pay for other criminal activities as exchanging it for fiat in an exchange cooperating with any authorities could be pretty hard.
Side note: if you buy something and it is physical at some point the package will have to be handed to you. That's a pretty tough nut to crack if you want to stay anonymous. At a minimum you're going to have to be proximate to the drop-point which makes playing 33 bits on you a lot easier.
But I don't want the government able to monitor every $2 purchase I make.
Please state what all the positive ramifications you are referring to are. All I see is essentially some extra convenience in exchange for a probable privacy nightmare.
Once payments are above a certain amount contact information must be collected as far as I know.
No bank transactions are anonymous.
Smaller money payments are anonymous, but mainly due to physical limitations creating enough hassle so that it can't be abused too much (without also braking the law). As well as historic reasons.
But did you ever consider that every bank note has a unique id which is tracked by banks when you pay in money (and I think) retrieve it?
Furthermore the EU as since basically it's creation slowly working on de-anonymizing payments wit the purpose of fighting crime and money laundering.
It's pretty much a straight forward continuation of pre-bitcoin invention policies.
I think anonymous/not anonymous binary distinction is too black/white.
Bitcoin is more anonymous than a bank transaction. If I buy something with a credit card, they have my credit card number that is easily linked to me. With Bitcoin it is less easy. Unfortunately with Bitcoin once you have been 'revealed' then your transaction 'graph' is then revealed in the public, whereas the credit card doesn't have that problem.
It depends who you want to be anonymous from. Governments can easily get bank transactions, and also they can investigate bitcoin-based crime and then just trace the public ledger.
Businesses will not easily get bank transactions or map general bitcoin addresses to people, but if you use a credit card you tend to have to give them a lot of other matching information such as your name and address, whereas with bitcoin you don't need to give them anything. Assuming there is no delivery involved it can be pretty anonymous. But again if they did happen to pattern match (maybe they have another customer who you have dealt with too) they could join some dots.
But to be safe it's best to assume Bitcoin is not anonymous and that anyone can find out eventually where you have spent your money.
I can see no harm in anonymous data exchange (except copyright infringement) on an open society. But if you can order whatever you want online anonymously -- that could result in some deplorable stuff. (That's why I think bitcoins will get shut down entirely by goverments at some point)
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