Bitcoin Forum

How anonymous bitcoin should be? Different people want it to develop in different direction. If they disagree, bitcoin may branch on several branches (hard-fork way or alt-coin way or whatever way). Which branch would you prefer?

-Taxcoin. Tax-friendly currency. Full transparency for authorities.
-Drugcoin. Drug-friendly currency. Generally, no transparency for authorities, but there are ways to track real criminals' money.
-Thugcoin. Absolute anonimity. No way to track payments send to ransom thugs and hired killers.  

Sorry if coin names sound like they are value-loaded. :)

I'd prefer absolutely anonymous coin. And I'd prefer to nickname it not thugcoin but Freedomcoin.

thug-coin! that's what i remains unsolved in bitcoin.

Exactly what we need op

Anonymous coin, even if it's called "thugcoin".

Definitely thug/freedom/anoncoin.

Bitcoin is not an anonymous currency.

It is a pseudonymous currency.

Definitely completely anonymous (as far as it is possible / if this is a "wish list").

how much more of this govt troll crap topics do we have to endure? ... we got it, anonymity is your nemesis, get over it ... cash was invented 2,600 years ago, anonymous money is not a new concept you dripping idiot.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

Criminals using bitcoin will get caught. Many of them anyway.

When you get away with something, you start to lose the thrill and so you get bolder and bolder and bolder until you get too bold and become bubba's bitch in an orange jumpsuit with numbers on it.

We don't need extra protections built in that take away the pseudo-anonymous nature of bitcoin.
Leave it be.

If you want everybody around you to share your views, use "ignore" button.  ;D

To everybody: thanks for participation. I myseld voted for the "drugcoin" and expected it to be the most popular choice. To my surprise, nobody else wanted it: some want full transparency, but most - full anonimity. Unfortunately I'm not a coin developer to implement it, but I believe they are around and care to re-check which way bitcoin wants to go.

thugcoin obv.  money is money, and a core fundamental feature of money is fungability and transferability.  the problem with tracing it is who controls the trace? who decides what is and is not a crime?  in the end money needs to be free, that's just all there is to it.

C'mon running a govt. troll poll on the bitcoin forum is just stupidly transparent ...   fungible (anonymous) coins have been around for 2,600 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia#First_coinage) say something original or you're just trolling ... "drugcoin", "thugcoin" is that the best you can do? really?

How about:
-PigGovermentTerroristCoin
-LibertyCoin
-FreeCoin

Mr Snowden's ex-bosses.

Shouldn't there be an option in the poll for 'bitcoin'?  I don't want any changes, I like it how it is right now.

Sorry, guys, but you will probably not get your anonimity.
Bitcoin dev team has different views.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262564.msg2805280#msg2805280

We need full anonimity and fast transactions.

Always!

Jeff Garzik doesn't think so, so you won't get it. His opinion is that let them spy on you is good price for letting you spy on them, and that bitcoin is a good tool for it.

Money doesn't work like that. It's a utopian dream, and totally impractical, to expect the market to choose inferior "everyone-knows-who-I-am-and-what-I-do-with-my-money" monetary product ahead of a fully private product.

If you purport to be in favour of such a crap type of non-private money, I find the following question to weed out the pretenders ... "Would you like to please post publicly how much you earn?"

My purport is to be in favor of privacy. And I am deeply disappointed by the fact that a core bitcoin developer is not on favor of it and the whole bitcoin development team is currently working on bitcoin feature that would make destroying it's privacy easier.

Tax Coin

What is thug-coin? Some new crap?

Wary, please stop putting words in the mouth of the developers.

Jeff Garzik mentionned, in the context of discussing an altcoin that used forced zerocoin laundering (to make taint entirely impossible), that the pseudonimity of the current bitcoin protocol cuts both ways. It allows those who want to be anonymous to hide their tracks (with some difficulty, although that's an artifact of the current ecosystem, it should get easier over time).
It also allows those who want to be fully transparent (charities for example) to disclose the addresses they own, and allows anyone to verify that the money is transferred and spent properly.
He was pointing out that the alleged solution threw out some benefits of the current approach. You translate that as "I don't like anonymity". That's not even remotely accurate.

Various members dev team have already spoken about approaches to increase anonymity, and the consensus seems to be that there aren't any techniques that can be applied right now and that are better than what we have (zerocoin being just too expensive in cpu/space terms). Many of them think laundry services will be sufficient for the foreseeable future.

Anonymity isn't under attack here, it's just that making improvements beyond what we already have is hard.
Let's not accuse people of subverting Bitcoin unless we have some evidence plz.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262564.msg2810869#msg2810869
Check the timing plz.

I know how it happens. You want to type "charity", but your fingers type "major corporations"  ;) A corporation that wishes for its finances to be auditable by the world at large. Why would a corporation wish to be audited "by the world at large"? It can only be forced to it. And if major corporations could be forced to it, everyone could. And it's a pity if bitcoin technology will help with it.

In the arms race between people and regulators Satoshi was talking about, bitcoin is a double-edged sword. It can lay path both to complete anonimity and to complete absense of it. That's why I was so disturbed to hear that a core bitcoin developer calls "wonderful" the "totalitarian" edge of this sword. If it's not what he meant, pass him personally my apologies.

Thanks for the explanation. I wish I could read it in the first place instead of "isn't it worderful".

I would say completely anonymity is far from realistic. I don't think we are ready for that. Completely anonymity increases the chance of ugly things e.g. Ponzi and also decreases the chance of the winning of Bitcoin. We need a balance between anonymity and regulation.

You're delusional. Anonymous cash has been the preferred form of money for over 2 millenia. It is only the advent of state digital fiat in the last 25 years that has opened the possibility for central planners/economists/LE to seize upon digital traceable currency as a silver bullet for every problem in the world. Predictably, it is unravelling into an unworkable mess.