Bitcoin Forum

Would you add your physical location to your payment address? What if that helps make bitcoin more legal and gain mass acceptance?

Sukhbir Benipal

I guess i would add my location if i had nothing to hide.
As an example, if i was a store or a local business, that would just be added publicity for free. right.
Same for a user buying coffee or a sandwich. If i am already sharing my location on instagram, snapchat, why do i care that someone saw me pay for my sandwich with bitcoin.

crypto currency being non traceable and all

You are badly misinformed

yea, i know. just sayin' to get the conversation started. That's why i mentioned the "whole idea of"

Well, it defeats the purpose, I wouldn't do it, we already live in a surveillance state, a worldwide one.

but wouldn't the fact that you could use bitcoin or whatever at your local stores and shops just like regular currency be a pretty good argument otherwise?

An good argument for what? im not tagging my bitcoin wallet addresses with my physical address, wtf

i would. maybe i'm just looking at this whole situation differently.

Are you stupid?

no. if you want some form of legal adoption, you would need to make sure that majority usage is legal. right.

Why would BTC usage be illegal without your street address/other personal info being tacked on?

as of now it's sort of in a grey zone the world over. neither legal, nor having been declared explicitly illegal / banned. At your own Risk kinda thing.
I mean, if you went to the cops and told them someone robbed you of your BTC, they would just look you up and down.

No freaking way. Doing this would be putting a giant target on your back. You received 5 bitcoins? Let me check your physical address real quick so I could mug you. Yeah, no. Never going to happen.

yea. but the fact that you can have multiple addresses. so you would use one just for your day to day sales and purchases.

Sukhbir Benipal

There may be a use case for what you're talking about, but I don't see it useful to be added to the protocol, maybe in a third party service, like Coinbase.

the reason i am starting this thread is because i believe in this. truly.i am putting my full and complete information out there in order that others may see my point of view.
My android app is live on Google Play Store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benipal.road

I wrote a vision statement on the play store description that talks more about how i view this. My only issue is that moving forward bitcoin might not be the currency i end up using, because of the low transaction volume allowed by design. Perhaps something tracking the main index.

In this situation when bitcoin is not regulated and in some countries is more illegal than legal but general in some grey zone I don't think how clever this could be. I don't think that information like this could lead to biger adoption. Location itself without other data doesn't mean anything.
But I disagree that bitcoin is not traceable. Bitcoin has lost quite a part of anonimity and today there are some techniques and methods to identify the user.

traceable, yes. but takes substantial effort.

my thought is that by making everyday sales and transactions public, say for example, buying coffee or a sandwich, merchants and stores feel more comfortable in accepting it. and that leads to lower volatility.

No way. What's the point? Crypto is popular also due to its anonymity.

yea, but that's also one of the many reasons why it is not legal. popularity as of now is not that huuuuuge. great, but not mass.

things need to change.

check out my vision statement in detail at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benipal.road

i am making my info fully public because i believe in what i am doing. i definitely want to change how general public looks at bitcoin.

Sukhbir Benipal
Benipal Technologies
+1 (212) 579-8500

* edited the spam link.

What did you even mean by physical location?
The location where you made your transaction or going nuts all the way and publishing your home address.
Why even stop here, you should add your name, hone number, facebook page, how many kids you have and.. why the hell even your SSN !!

How would that make bitcoin more legal?
Who is going to enforce and check those , the government?

Besides the morons in NK (who might enjoy it) I don't see any government being that stupid to propose such thing.

Edit:
Checked you other link.
You're idea is nothing more than the labeling address blockchain.info was doing.

Thank you. You think my profile is spam and my vision is not much.

I appreciate your point of view. However, you have to think first why bitcoin has the reputation it does so far. And that is because of darknet marketplaces and .onion

The only way to cause serious change, And by serious, i mean mass acceptance, not bitcoin "enthusiasts", is to bring the transaction ecosystem of bitcoin more into the open, more public, not by making it more private.

You have obviously missed the point of me making my entire information public.

Edit: Why even stop here, you should add your name, hone number, facebook page, how many kids you have and.. why the hell even your SSN !!

I believe except your SSN, you are already willingly giving that information to FB without asking who is checking it.

We have bank accounts where they have all our information right?
Why would I want to use crypto if we'd have to go through ridiculous measures like revealing your location.

I might as well use my cc + paypal in that case...

i believe the original idea behind bitcoin was not to hide from the government. but rather to create an alternate reserve currency as a direct result of the financial crisis in 2008, which was caused by a variety of issues, but mostly cheap money.

if you look at the bitcoin architecture from a philosophical point of view, it exactly imitates our mining of gold.

yea, i know. just sayin' to get the conversation started. That's why i mentioned the "whole idea of"

While I don't have anything to hide I would prefer to not do that as it pretty much ruins the purpose.

For Services like Coins and Coinbase this should be mandatory in order to make the usability/microtransactions more acceptable by the mass.
For the current holders, it's not a current option but after maturity, being anonymous might be an issue to the authority.

No, I am not planning or doing something illegal but I don't like my identity and place of living being exposed, that is the reasons why I am using bitcoin, I afraid somebody can misuse the information, as we know we need to be very careful when we revealed something on Internet

It will affect BTC anonymity that is one of the BTC good feutures. At the same time BTC could be legal with anonimity feuture enabled

If you use any social network, you are already doing all that

Bitcoin is made to be untracked but can be seen, why should there be an address? are you kidding? think carefully before asking.

No i would not. This is not what crypto is supposed to be about. It's meant to be freedom of currency moving anywhere in the world. I would like to see some exchanges set up in tax havens sometime so that they can legally continue to do there thing without all these bureaucrats interfering and attempting to stop something that they have no control over.

i don't think any real tax havens exist anymore after FATCA

"mass acceptance" of bitcoin is partly because it is providing a good level of privacy and the design is in a way that you don't give any information more than you need to.
change that and you will eventually end up with something that has nothing interesting over usual payment methods and fiat! then why should we even use it then?

there is no mass acceptance. not even remotely.

Yea, i don't see it being part of the protocol itself. More on the services that it is used for. That needs to be more public.

bump

Not at all. This is the beauty of Bitcoin. Total anonymity. I hope it remains so for some time to come. we should all be grateful that the bitcoin protocol provides us with the privacy we require in our financial operations.

wouldn't do it, because what i like from bitcoin is it's anonymity, and it is benefit of bitcoin than other digital currencies. even some country make it legal, they wouldn't ask to people's location

Well that defeats the part where btc transactions are supposed to be amonymous right? And wouldn't that also compromise the security of your transactions as well? I think its better left as it is for now.

anonymity is one thing. but greater public acceptance is another. have to trade off.

Why do people need to see you bought a sandswich from store? Does it benifit people to see someones personal info? May be, but everything is different here and bitcoin was specifically made to be utilized without restrictions. I would never prefer to be controlled and watched by legal parties like we are watched by governments when we transfer a huge amount of funds.

That could be a dangerous thing, and you might expose your position, and if you have a lot of bitcoins, your personal security may be under threat.

If you add your physical location to your payment address then what's point in Bitcoin being anonymous and stuff. How is it gonna be anonymous when all the people know whom they are having a transaction with. You might as well use your cash to buy coffee and sandwich and who's gonna pay the transaction fees?

Nobody will know that you bought a sandwich.
They will just know that you have bought something from company x.
Even if you use a credit card do you think that you have all your purchases recorded in the transactions?
Do you know how visa servers would look on Christmas and Black Friday ?

But even with this, still a pretty stupid idea.


As stated many times before.
Bitcoin is not fully anonymous!!!!!!


Weird. Credit cards and debit cads payment have reached almost 60% here in my country and nobody is able to see my purchases.
How did it work for them?

nope, I dont want to add it. Imagine spending big amount of money then someone can see it, even those bad guys. they can have the information on where you are located then they might to to your location and do something bad to you. This is a matter of security so I won't do it

Nope. Why should I ? It is supposed to be anonymous.

In our country Bitcoin is not legal nor considered illegal, the government is not oppose on it but the bank is. So, my opinion it is not wise to tag your physical location, for which if someone wants to rob those who have bigger holdings of bitcoin then you are broadcasting that you should be a target. There are many means of robbing your holdings, even if you put it in an encrypted folder there is always a way to decrypt it by others. They can also resort to taking your laptop and phones if they can't hack your account. Also, in our country, the bank would then know who will they try to convince not to use bitcoin.

I don't understand...

Why would you share your location? What is the point?

Bitcoin (and other crypto) allows you to be anonymous and still have guaranteed, verified transactions. Why would you bother giving a piece of information like this? If someone ask you this, you should not give him your address. there are many other ways of securing transactons that does not recquire personnal information.

Keep in mind that bitcoin is a wonderful tool... but that it can also be used for scams.  :o

If the address is needed then I would not mind adding it to my payment address. However btc is known to be untraceable so that isn’t needed.

bump

I think location as in Country is still fine. You can have specific wallets that you're fine with revealing that info?

Of course yes why would you not add your personal location to your payment address? There's nothing to hide about it as long as it's legal.

I will gladly add my location address to my Payment wallet address.
This comes as the best way to help the world fight off criminal activities such as scammers and then money laundering, terror sponsoring and drug trafficking.

I wouldn't include my location as it is against the purpose and mission of the Blockchain Technology. Anonymousity of users and location is key thus I wouldn't dare input my location.

That's true, but then again, that would somewhat defeat the purpose of cryptocurrency transactions which is supposed to be in anonymity and with privacy. Maybe if you are a business or enterprise that engages in the sale or offering of goods and services and accepts cryptocurrencies as payment, then it is no question that you have to add your physical address, but if you are the buyer or the customer who transacts with cryptocurrencies, I think there is no need to do that since you can still do your transactions perfectly without disclosing such information.

No, I would not. The reason I'm using cryptocurrencies is I like my anonymity. I don't share my location, my name, and any other personal details in the Internet. You won't find my picture anywhere in the web, I don't have a facebook account or any other social media stuff. I also don't give away my telephone number. I'm sure there's more people like me and I hope that there will be even more as people are waking up and starting to protect their privacy.

Do you know why bitcoin was made? It is meant to offer decentralization and complete anonymity.

Putting your location on the payment address destroys the purpose of anonymity that Bitcoin is offering to its users. Yes it may be a way to legalize Bitcoin but it just kills the concept of decentralization. It does not make sense. There are other currencies aside from Bitcoin that can be used for this type of transaction.

I think adding your physical location might be a good idea but somehow it is also not a good idea especially if you huge amount of holdings or cryptocurrency. Aside adding your physical location we can still make good idea which help to promote bitcoin and then might have massive adoption.

Bitcoin is decentralize and i do not want to reveal my location so i will not be interested to reveal my location. I think this is nothing to to with mass adaption of bitcoins as it is not a requirement and no one is forcing you to give your address when all the payment is online through bitcoins.

Well this might be a helpful security measure but it can be false any one can put any fake location so it quite unimportant you can still make safe payment without adding your location

No I don't add my physical location to my payments address. I will add my physical location to my payments address later . Thanks to remember me .

No. I would not want for this to happen and I don't think it legitimizes Bitcoin. What does it matter and how it convinces people that Bitcoin is legit? My physical location validates nothing.

No.

We dont need bitcoin to be legal and we want to remain anonymous!
As a payment system bitcoin works just fine without identities.

No, I wouldn't want to. Firstly, it is very unsafe. You become an excellent target for robbers. This is the same as writing your address to Facebook or Instagram, and then indicate the location that you are now on the beach in a hot country. "Guests" will not be long in coming.

Of course I would not mind adding a location to a bitcoin address if it is a business bitcoin address then adding a location isn't such a bad idea and could prove that your business is genuine. However, it will not be advisable if it is a personal address for safety and security reasons.

I don't think so. I come from Europe and in Europe we care about privacy very much and personaly I don't like to disclose my personal data when that isn't necessary or important condition for some services.
Adding your location could be misused and could have some implications like becoming a target for different illegal activities.
I realy don't think this is necessary and I also think that on that way I could lose more than I could get, so no, I wouldn't do that.

It seems to me that with the introduction of this feature, privacy takes a back seat. I mean there is no sense in allowing to determine your location when the anonymity is one of the main advantages of crypto trading. The authorities keep on pushing the crypto world to that, introducing these waves of sanctions and all stuff like that to pull the plug and take cryptos under control

without showing physical location, the government already knows that we have or use bitcoin, it is strongly proven that they have data about bitcoin users in the world
this can be used as a benchmark for the government in following up on matters relating to bitcoin in the community in general

Of course a lot of people would argue that simply doing that would mean letting go of the anonymity that is attached to bitcoin or crypto currency use but lite did they know that every transaction that goes through most exchange sites is location attached whether specifically stated or not. The reason is because the KYC rules which majority if exchange sites who didn't think about it one year ago have now made it a compulsory endeavor.

I never do anything bad, and in my country there is no problem to hold bitcoin so i will say yes for it. If that can help bitcoin to mass adopted, i think people will gladly to do it too because it can give benefit for them.

Many people loves cryptocurrency because of it's anonymity and wouldn't agree to the idea of adding physical address to their Bitcoin address but if you're a business owner then adding your business address is a good move for you

i think the bad time of market right now. so i don't do anything with this