Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is often hyped as a potentially-anonymous method of making transactions, but how many people actually use it in this way? We can plainly see that privacy is a very weak point in the current developments within bitcoin. It is easy to trace spending patterns through the blockchain, IP addresses, and wallet reuse. However, the question remains, will anonymizing techniques be enhanced in the coming years, or will bitcoin development bend to the whim of policy makers and advocates of ‘stopping criminal behavior’?

Many ill-informed users of technology will almost always hear the word anonymity and spout out the question “doesn’t that allow terrorists to do terrible things?” “What about money laundering?” These are perspectives riddled with a fallacy of short-sightedness and reactive rather than proactive measures.

Technology is a tool which extends the physical and mental capabilities of humans. Not limited to individual use, technologies also enable collective humanity to extend their ability to exert control over their natural world, thus extending their physical capabilities. A nuclear fission reactor allows collective humanity the ability to control an aspect of natural and extract tremendous amounts of energy from it. Technologies themselves do not facilitate, exclusively, actions which could be described as good or evil.

Read the full post on Diginomics (https://diginomics.com/anonymity-is-a-human-right/).

in this world if you want one thing you will miss another, you can't have both anonimity and security, who want anonimity will be seen as a crimninal or tax evader, but not all want anon for doing bad illegal activity, some of them are just protecting their privacy

bitcoin should definitely aim at full anonimity, who want more security will not use it or will not use the anon part of bitcoin(by simply registering every move he does, talking about taxes, here but it could apply for everything)

this is the only way to have both things, let the people can choose, is the key

Bitcoin is always anonymous, only if you know how to use it anonymously. :)

I strongly disagree.

The only effect BTC anonymity generates is to attract tons or scammers, thieves and ponzi pumpers to the industry. They are able to scam ordinary users, especially newbies and by doing this they do a lot of damage to the crypto world. Why would I want to support something like that?

if you want to do some anon transactions try alternative coins which are built for anonymity i would suggest to use  monero. bitcoin might become complete anon in future.

Bitcoin was designed to be semi-anon.
For the blockchain to work, everything is known by everyone,
but no one (unless info is publicly given, such as tags) knows who actually controls which address.
That is the current anonymous aspect to Bitcoin, and is very important.

In the event that all addresses in the future, must be labeled with real people's identities (and verified),
whether to stop scams or for tax purposes, or to prevent other crimes or etc, then there is no point in using Bitcoin.
We just basically neutered Bitcoin and transformed it into a means for a totalitarian system of control.

We would basically have a open banking system that everyone can see all transactions and see who owns what, who sends money to who, and etc.
I could not think of a better system for governments to use to oppress the people for the new age of crypto-currency.

Forget it

Use Monero to stay untraceable

I do not believe "ANONYMITY IS A HUMAN RIGHT" as the article argues. You can have anonymity in voting, in journalism, but you cannot have anonymity when you start a business, or rent a car. That's outside the scope of bitcoin anyway.

Using Bitcoin can be anonymous if you use it correctly and do not sell Bitcoin for fiat in an exchange. You don't need full anonymity for small amounts. I don't mind if someone knows I bought a cup of coffee with bitcoin this morning. If and when I need more anonymity, I use a mixer.


Improving security of the bitcoin network is more important than improving anonymity.

This,

if someone still say bitcoin is anonymous, I think he should first inform himself and after talk. It's a personal choice reveal our own identity or am I wrong? If someone dosn't want to be "pseudo-anonymous" he is free to reveal who is behind that address (or those addresses).




Monero is not anoymous (again) , neither Darkcoin aka dash. So please stope to say that thing http://techforum.it/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/asd.gif.

They're talking about relative anonymity, not absolute anonymity which is of course, impossible(Nothing, not even if you're invisible can be completely and wholly anonymous). In the case of relative anonymity, Monero, as it stands, is the most anonymous altcoin with it's Cryptonote system. Dash is just bitcoin with coinjoin/mixing in the the protocol instead of as a 3rd party, so it's entirely useless as you can just use Bitcoin with decentralized coinjoin/mixing(Darkwallet, Coinshuffle).

It is the only effective option at this time to stay untraceable

btw, it has the view key feature which allows you to turn off privacy on demand

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/ltb-e202-understanding-monero

Then monero should replace bitcoin (under this point of view) but why does not it replace BTC? Because you can stay "anonymous" also with bitcoin if you know what are you doing. There are a lot of people who don't care so much about the anonimity, so as kingcolex "monero and Dash crowd are fighting constantly even when there is no place for it." but if someone want to say untraceable then he should use only monero or am I wrong?

I'm not going to argue with you on opinions of whether you think there's a place for it or not, but I will say that Dash is a scam. A currency like Dash with a 2million+ coin ouput in 2 days during the release and then have that ouput reduced by 300%+ by its developers right after, is a blatant scam.

P.S. Anonymity is the most important aspect besides Decentralization

Maybe it will


Yea, trust third party honeypot mixers. Unfortunately the average joe doesnt know what he's doing

Bitcoin is 100% anonymous,the users are the only ones that has to keep its anonymity,if nobody knows your address,your address is not linked to you,so you are anonymous

I doubt if anything you do on the internet is fully anonymous, even if you use Tor / Proxies / Private VPN's etc. etc..

Most people do understand that Bitcoin is not fully anonymous... most of us, acctually promote it as being pseudonymous...

It would be stupid to have a blockchain or a Alt coin based on the blockchain {cough.. Ripple} where you can identify everyone and see all the transactions they do. {Stalkers / hackers / thiefs and marketers will have a field day, with that knowledge.

So we use the blockchain in a way to hide our "treasure" from the people, who wants to steal it. {The traditional banking system, hides it's ledger to protect your financial information... why not with Bitcoin?}

Governments or a skilled hacker CAN still trace your identity with Bitcoin, if they used a little effort. {Browser finger printing etc.}

Some people seek political freedom for honest reasons, freedom isn't always pretty, but many undesirable "thieves" will exist in any system. Bitcoin offers advantages that the others do not.

I'd go a step further and say that almost nothing in life is anonymous anymore, people are always tracked down or information leaked etc.

Bitcoin being anonymous means that it will never be mainstream, the move away from anonymity means that it is more likely to take off as a true internet currency, but in doing so it also means it will not be the currency that Satoshi had envisaged.  It's a bit of a catch22 really.

I imagine that soon they will have choked local bitcoin to near extinction, and all regulated exchanges will require KYC checks, so using bitcoin will be the same as using SWIFT, except for being cheaper and global and not so government controlled, and not being hyper-inflatable... it's still a good improvement over what we have now!

I disagree again. The main strengths of BTC should be the lack of fees, easy access to financing from anywhere, application built at the top of the blockchain, etc.etc. Nothing related to anonymity.
I will never advocate something which can help people avoid taxes, set dark markets, sell drugs, finance terrorism etc. I see this as unfortunate side effect of BTC which is there exactly due to the lack of any kind of control and consumer protection. Personally, I would like it to go away so we can have this beautiful new technology developing on new ideas, business, investment funds, increased financing options, BTC start-ups etc. All this has nothing to do with anonymity.

I do not think monero will replace bitcoin (as money).




Yes of course, a lot of people don't have the knowledge and they don't know what they are doing. This is the real problem, but with a few accorgment, you can have a good level of anonymity also with bitcoin.

Even the bank account or Paypal account used to withdrawal the equivalent money can be traceable very easily. Government is right now truing a blind eye towards it but it can be traceable within fraction of time.

wehn you spend btc and you must spend them at the end, otherwise they become pointless, you will be caught , they can track you back anytime, it's not 100% anon at all, but at this point they could only know your position, not who you are

if you keep moving after every "spent", you should be pretty safe from tracking

Bitcoins pseudonymity is the best option, more anonymity will attract bunch of scams and theft and criminals and will hurt a global currency more than it already does. If your goal is reaching mainstream then pushing for anonymity is the worst thing.

Once the dark wallet is complete bitcoin will be more anonymous for users who want to stay anonymous. Wallets liek coinbase try to extract as much private info as they can from their users so I would suggest you to use the dark wallet for anonymous bitcoin transcations.

Why do you consider the Bitcoin technology beautiful?  Certainly, the underlying idea is clever, but all that it enables is a way of transferring wealth across the internet without the need to trust a 3rd party.  Mainstream financial networks need trusted 3rd parties to function, and a significant duty of those parties is in stymieing criminal activity.

If Bitcoin is beautiful to you, then the existing banking system should be more beautiful still, for this system:

• requires participants to register their personal information, information which is used to catch criminals.
• allows chargebacks used to reduce the effectiveness of fraud.
• enables lawful investment, big business, and start-ups.
• stores transactions in a small number of secure locations (rather than on thousands of nodes all over the world).
• processes transactions using a small number of protected servers (rather than via a global, wasteful, POW-based competition).
• allows monetary policy thought necessary to maintaining financial stability.
• allows state-approved banking with many regulations designed to prevent bad behaviour.
• allows lawful high-tech extensions deployed by huge companies (see developments by Apple, Google, and Facebook).
• is already mainstream and far less volatile than Bitcoin.

The first two points imply the reduced access and also make up for the lion's share of the fees.  One can argue that Bitcoin does lead to lower fees due to competition between potential transaction processors but, with no systemic anonymity, these processors would quickly become swamped in regulation and reporting requirements, killing off all but a handful of giants (parallel to VISA and MasterCard).

TL;DR:  Anonymity goes hand-in-glove with "low fees" and "easy access".