Bitcoin Forum

It is very possible that bitcoin will lead to an increase in surveillance of payments and transactions. Where cash is being systematically phased out by governments, what will take its place, naturally, is an electronic form of cash (https://www.diginomics.com/?p=251) which is more readily traceable (https://www.diginomics.com/?p=2525). The powers that be desire the ability to aggregate large amounts of data and form predictions of behavior based on spending patterns.

Money, as a language, is a very telling indicator of where people are placing their intention and their purchasing power. The political establishment will do whatever it can to ensure that users of electronic currency (and bitcoin) are tracked, controlled, and if need be, chipped (https://www.diginomics.com/?p=9336).

Make no mistake about it, if the current political trajectory does not change, the political establishment will have their way and the surveillance of payments will be here very shortly. For those who do not comply or submit to authority, their representation on this electronic network (https://www.diginomics.com/?p=8830) will be switched off like a light switch.

Although the nuances remain undetermined, what is clear is that bitcoin empowers cashlessness (https://www.diginomics.com/?p=9118). It also risks being co-opted by large mining operations. Central banks are looking at issuing their own crypto-style currency, but who will choose these over the original implementation of 2009?

There are many known unknowns in the bitcoin industry. However, what remains clear is that we have an era of total surveillance ahead of us, and bitcoin is one of many technologies which empower it.

Bitcoin allows some ways of achieving pretty good privacy - currently we have mixers, in the future there will be Lightning Network, coinjoin, schnorr signatures and other options. Users also have to take steps to protect their privacy by following some rules - don't reuse addresses, be careful with what inputs you include, don't post your addresses on social networks, etc. It's seriously wrong to portray Bitcoin as a surveillance tool.

I understand why you might think this, but the problem is that, even though we have a open ledger, which means basically anyone is able to see how many transactions, to what addresses are these transactions are going to, and the amount of it - this doesn't mean it's easy to determine someone's identity.

We are able to see a wide range of addresses, but unlike banking systems, the account number doesn't directly link to someone, and it could be anyone's addresses - whichs makes transactions fairly safe for you, especially if you aren't making frequent big transactions which might be flagged, espeically if you are doing something illegal.

We are going digital and specifically going blockchain that's for sure. There's going to be two types of blockchain based money, a government issued traceable digital coin and an anonymous and untraceable crypto currency which the government would love to kill but they can't.
Tracing every bitcoin transaction is not viable for any government. There are some instance of bitcoin being traced with the help of exchanges which were basically to make the scammer/hacker not be able to use it and possibly track and bring them to justice. That's exceptional cases, no government would be able to track something like every transaction over 1 BTC or so.

It would be interesting to see how a straightforward soft fork that instantly gave impenetrable privacy would be received.

I'm pretty sure its transparency is one of the reasons it's tolerated.

If that vanished with a click a lot of people would be having kittens.

Even if payments are traceable in the blockchain, knowing the owner of the address is another step ahead. Sure, you could use KYC provided in some exchanges, but there's still privacy in using the network, such as being a full node won't require you to go through online wallets that may have also KYC in them.

People may not want to use govermment minted cryptocurrency, but if they imposed such law that prohibits usage of other cryptocurrency other than their own, then that banning mechanism would affect bitcoin somehow. If enterprises aren't allowed to adopt bitcoin once their crypto is made, then who else would use BTC if companies can't accept it from the people, which is quite a threat if that happens.

It's a very well thought scenario and I wouldn't dare to disagree here! However, bitcoin is here to empower the thought only but in practicality, it's super hard to implement in bitcoin or on any other cryptos.

The government created currencies will not be the same for sure and it will be like a bank account. You will be assigned an account number after proper KYC and you have to use it for every transaction, the way we use internet banking today! So there's literally no change in modus operandi! It will just add some convenience in transactions and that's it! Surveillance will obviously be there loke the way we have on our bank accounts!

Isn't that Monero/Dash? Those blockchains are definetly not transparent or very user-friendly and no-one is able to see anyone else's wallet unless they have special keys, from my understanding of the coins.

I think if BTC was made with that sorta mindset, the government would be screwed, and it'll be impossible to track criminals since you can't shift through a public ledger and don't have any clues at all to go off of.

Yes, I agree with your opinion. Further introduction of cryptocurrency into our lives as a whole will lead to increased government control over our financial activities. The introduction of any technology will inevitably strengthen government control over the financial activities of society. It is possible to store anonymously cryptocurrency, transferring it to another individual anonymously is also possible. However, it will be almost impossible to buy cryptocurrency, exchange cryptocurrency for fiat, so that the government does not become aware of this. We then will be able to conclude that the most anonymous form of financial settlements was cash.

If you want to have more privacy when making transactions, use anonymous cryptocurrencies. Thus, leading cryptocurrencies like Monero, Zcash and the like just solve the problem of control of your money from anyone. And ordinary electronic money in Bank accounts of course are subject to control. All your operations are known. Banks know what you spent your money on. To be honest, I do not see this as a problem for law-abiding citizens. And, I also do not understand why some citizens so want this most notorious privacy when making money transfers and payments.

I fully agree with your statement that we are in the era where the government and other institutions can be tracking and doing surveillance upon the people but I don't agree that much that Bitcoin is the technology powering it. Data is now the new gold and these companies and entities can be using the data gathered the many tools available when we are doing our thing online. Although there are now also ways and means that we can use to remain private and not tracked. I am not so sure if the general population is quite ready for this coming era. What is clear to me is that even without Bitcoin, surveillance has been there monitoring movement of people especially in light of the fight against terrorism, money laundering and illicit drug trade. There are always good ground why surveillance can be made and of course this initiative and power can be abused anytime by people who have their own self-vested interests. In the past, we thought that Bitcoin is providing us the privacy and being anonymous we need but we alter on this is not the case as Bitcoin is actually pseudonymous.

OP, manage your UTXO well. Use Wasabi, Samourai Wallet, and Join Market. Plus use the mixers available if you want to feel safe from surveillance. 8)

If the government really wants, they can make it hard enough for normal people to use crypto currency but that won't stop money launderers from using it. The best way would be to go through some regulations where the government would have some form of monitoring while people transacts without restrictions. Freedom doesn't mean doing anything without restrictions.

Basically, It doesn't necessarily mean that if you want anonymous transaction then you are doing some illegal activities. We as a people want some privacy that government hasn't provided us, in this case, we found cryptocurrency and bitcoin in particular that will provide us the anonymity that  we want. Going back to the topic, we can always use mixers to send and transfer money if we really like to stay anonymous using bitcoin in the cryptospace.

This includes that the government wants to be under controlled all of the aspects by knowing the identity of the users of crypto. If you want to become anonymous it is not necessarily that you want to do something illegal like money laundering, illegal transactions and other bad stuffs. I dont think that the best way to prevent some bad activities or transactions in crypto is to monitor by the government because the people here in the crypto will not aggree to this especially those big whales who doesn't want to exposed their identity for their security purposes.

I'd like to point out that privacy does not equal anonymity.

Bitcoin works in such a way that your transactions are public, but your identity is anonymous. Surveillance groups can watch over your transactions as much as they want, but they won't know they're yours unless you reveal your identity (KYC, wallet links, etc.).

If you want to avoid surveillance, then don't divulge your identity. There are services such as CoinJoin and mixers to help you on that end, so it's very doable even if you can't avoid KYC exchanges. As such, Bitcoin doesn't necessarily empower surveillance.

Bitcoin is transparent to a certain extent because each and every transaction is recorded on the blockchain, which is likened to a public ledger. So if a government office, for example, is provided with a budget that is deposited through its designated Bitcoin wallet, then the transactions will be fully public and transparent, and could be traced in the blockchain. There is full surveillance. Every single withdrawal is known and could be verified. This is very attractive especially when it comes to public funds. But every office should be provided with a single or a couple of wallets to easily manage accountability. 

And privacy coins are slowly being driven out of exchanges. No one really cares about them. They're microscopic.

An insta private bitcoin would not screw governments. Governments would probably shut down all banking and crypto businesses.

This is why I think privacy coins such as Monero are very important. Bitcoin just simply isn't anonymous. It's very hard to acquire (large amounts) of bitcoin without KYC, and once you have KYC you're bitcoin address can be linked to your real identity. And once that is the case it is very hard to anonymize yourself again IMO. Mixers aren't really a solution for that, they are more of a security (or privacy in this case) through obscurity measure than an actual private solution, they may make it harder to follow a trail of payments but not impossible. The only way I see currently to anonymize crypto is to exchange through Monero but again, that's not always easy without KYC. I think it is very important to have a private form of payment. Cash is dissapearing, and soon every payment will be digital. Which means private coins will become even more important.

I think the era of surveillance is now when we mostly use bank transfers and credit cards for most of our expenses. Of course that the blockchain technology will add a layer of transparency on public funds because I suppose they will be forced to use public bitcoin addresses where everybody can check the transactions. However as my comrades said in the thread Bitcoin is pretty private if you don't divulge your addresses and maybe use obfuscation methods. The developers working on Bitcoin are working to implement more complex privacy features like schnorr signatures and other pretty cool stuff.

There are already mechanisms in place to prevent them from nosing into our transactions, besides, it's not something they're currently doing?
This has nothing to do with Bitcoin, this is already a trend of the countries themselves, justifying it as a national security measure.

To be fair it's not so hard to track bitcoin payments and I believe during massive steals people were using all of the consideration which you stated but seems as time goes, it becomes more and more easier to track and catch your victims which uses bitcoin.
For privacy, there is better altcoin and it's Monero to my mind.
Well, bitcoin may increase surveillance of payments cause, I don't remember but one country plans to take rule that bitcoin transactions higher than 1K usd or something similar must be declared. It was posted on btctalk, can't remember the exact topic/post.

IMO this view largely overestimates the power of the governments over Bitcoin. Yes, transactions are public, so while transactions that go through bank accounts are usually only available to specific users and the bank itself, whereas a Bitcoin transaction is available to anyone who wished to see it, basically. However, while you cannot have a bank account without verifying your ID, you can have as many Bitcoin addresses as you wish without disclosing any of your personal data. And while the government can push to require KYC where Bitcoin is used, there'll always be an option to remain hidden by using another wallet.