Bitcoin Forum

Message from anonymous bitcoin community members for other members explaining how bitcoin is working for the last ten years. Its a platform developed for entire humanity by humans. The protocol is robust enough to defend itself against all hacks. Even the developers of the protocol can't change or manipulate it. It is very likely that the developers of this protocol are with us all the time.
What we need is to stay safe in this current crisis, as this crisis will be over just like all crises of history. Be safe!

First off, Bitcoin is only pseudonymous and not anonymous by default.

Second, what the hell is that linked video? It started off with "on behalf of the entire team at Satoshi Nakamoto". That's an auto pass for me.

One thing I like about bitcoin is its anonymity, ease of use, peer-to-peer payment, and its less volatility. All these said are just not enough about bitcoin. It is truly a safe haven for holders and also a way of investing.
About the anonimity you talked about, it is true. I have three wallets that require no verification, no email and remain non-custodian generating different public addresses anytime I want to make a transaction. Even, if my transaction is tracked or traced, I still remain anonymous because it can not be linked to my identity. I love bitcoin for this.

@mk4   Please, why did you say bitcoin is psydonumouse? With what I know about bitcoin, it is not pseudonymous at all. It can be anonymous if you choose too. If you choose a verified wallet makes it to be non anonymous but there are many wallets like Trezor, Ledger Nano, coinomi, and many other wallets that do not even require you of email address and the anonymity remains the main goal.

Well said mate, bitcoin will still be a safe haven for me, bitcoin won't be dead, we have been in this situation before, we have experience more than this before, there are so many crisis that we have experience before but bitcoin is still there, yes those crisis affects the bitcoin because when crisis happens the market goes down whuch results to the price of different cryptocurrency to go down but it is still bouncing back.

Bitcoin won't be dead there are so many players, investors, big whales that support bitcoin they won't let this thing happens.

To make this post more reliable, you should include the link where you got this information.

Probably a way to say "we are all Satoshi Nakamoto", but it still sounds pretty bad to use his name this way..

We will get past the crisis, but it's gonna be a long path until we get there. It's gonna be "fun" until all things end..

Why did you decide that Bitcoin is anonymous? It's traceable, although tracing it is a difficult task. Of cause, there are a lot of methods of making Bitcoin really private, but it isn't anonymous by its nature.

Bitcoin is not anonymous. That is why bitcoin mixers are so popular and there are a lot of Bitcoin mixers on Bitcointalk too. But I think that Bitcoin has a big future because people need it. Even now when there is a world financial crysis Bitcoin is more stable than fiat and stock market.

Well, it is not that people need it since it is not an essential but people want it to be able to earn a good profit in the future. It is proven that despite the stock and the fiat being affected by the pandemic, the price of bitcoin is still stabling at a certain price. Well, it is not that the pandemic can directly affect the price of bitcoin. Another thing is that because of the pseudonymity of bitcoin, the government might create a law or a policy on using it in the future.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous because there is no personal information attached to a Bitcoin address(though information can be affiliated with your address if you transacted with a centralized entity). Bitcoin is not anonymous because obviously, the blockchain is transparent hence we can visibly see every single transaction that occured in the network. Using non-custodial wallets only helps you become pseudonymous.

You can read this post quotes from Satoshi, Satoshi already said Bitcoin it's not anonymous

Bitcoin address are tied to a name if these BTC are from exchanges which collected data frm users thru KYC. That makes BTC not anonymous. Unless the BTC address isn't from exchange, it would be hard to know who owns the wallet but the link is there. So the reason some just use BTC once and forget about it.

I might slightly disagree on this coz even we are under codenames/false names/tx's/addresses this also fall that we are anonymous for most coz no one can tell if you're behind that address to one another. Anonymous is not knowing the identity but knows what it looks,smell or appear in any sense while anonymity on the other hand is not knowing completely. So I guess neither of this, the decentralization of bitcoin will fall onto, but who cares?

You should've watched it man, these people are trying to educate people using this infomercial, Big help indeed but it will be a lot bigger if you the OP post it outside the forum.

It's not an opinion, it's a fact. Sure all we see are just addresses and tx IDs, but those data can easily easily be traced back to a personal identity(may it be an exchange account, or an IP address, etc); especially if you don't take extra privacy precautions. Hence, pseudonymous. This has been addressed a lot of times already throughout the years. I suggest looking deeper into it.

Another important thing is that if anonymity wasn't necessary or part of Bitcoin goal, satoshi wouldn't have used tor and we probably would have identified his coins by now. Same as people developing auxiliary anonymity tech for Bitcoin. If anonymity is not necessary developers won't be in hurry to build anonymity tech.
In my opinion, It's possible to buy bitcoin today and nothing man-made will be able identify who bought them. Very few can do this I guess

It looks like this turn out to be a debate between anonymous and psuedo anonymity of bitcoin. Lol.

Bitcoin is psuedo anonymous everyone can still be tracked specially if you used centralised exchange that requires or enforces KYC. There are mixers or tumblers to keep you away from the prying eyes of the public, or even conjoins + TOR.

I have a wallet through which I access bitcoins. Tell me how can you trace me since you only have my wallet address?

I agree about pseudonymity, it's an important thing to note. The video is indeed really weird. It reminds me of those intro videos made by ICOs, they usually have animation and the narration voice is so typical. Anyway, after saying stuff on behalf of Nakamoto they address 'You, the people' which I cannot help but associate with a sort of offensive 'you people'. Only here they don't offend any specific race or nationality, they manage to offend humanity somehow or at least make one feel uncomfortable for being human. I honestly don't know what to make of this video. It kind of has this education/Bitcoin promotion message, but it seems so weird and is basically an impostor video.

Bitcoin was not designed to make transactions anonymous. Every transaction you make is linked to a public key. In fact, your wallet address is just the hash of your public key. Theoretically, somebody could connect the payments you make to other bitcoin addresses to construct a group of wallet addresses that you are likely to control. This method is called address clustering, and address themselves are usually analyzed instead of their public keys.

Example: One of satoshi's wallet addresses is 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa. If I feed this into Wallet Explorer (https://www.walletexplorer.com/), it will show you the transactions that were made with this address. Here it will also list the addresses associated with your wallet.

Since that wallet only has one address in it, I'm going to provide another well known address as an example. This address 1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4 was the one used by laszlo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=143) to purchase 10000BTC worth of pizza. When you insert that into wallet explorer, it will list all the other addresses associated with his wallet.

Now you're probably wondering at this point how someone could discover your identity from these wallets. The short answer is I'm not sure, the long answer is that there exists a company called Chainalysis that does these kind of address clustering activities. I think they also know the addresses belonging to exchanges. So if anybody that uses Chainalysis service, which is limited to governments and large institutions, gets some transactions linking one of your wallets with a known exchange wallet, and manages to see your documents, then they can store your personal information along with your wallet addresses in whatever database they are using.

Or you could look at the addresses of bitcointalk members and then wallet explorer could identify their other addresses, but not much information about their identity would be inferred since most of us are pseudonymous.

These methods of address identification fall apart completely if you use mixers to break the link between previous transactions and now.

Keep in mind that some mixers don't work as intended. There's a great paper on this so if somebody doesn't know it yet, take a look there[1].

So while in theory mixer could help you, finding one that works and reputable is hard. Remember that there are at least 2 mixers that do an exit scam this year iirc.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5117328.0

It doesn't need to be as in depth as that. There are hundreds of potential ways to link an address to a real life identity.

Looking at things like common inputs, change addresses, address reuse, exact amount transactions, and so forth, allows you to build up a picture of which addresses are linked to which other addresses. If I know you own address A, I can use these methods to ascertain that you also own addresses B, C, and D, for example.

Once I know a bunch of addresses you own, it only takes one single mistake to link one of those addresses to your real identity. Perhaps one of those addresses is a web wallet, which will know your email address and IP address. Perhaps you sent one of those addresses to someone in an email, or posted it on a forum, or sent it on twitter, or any other medium where your account is linked to your email or other personal data. Perhaps one of those addresses received coins from an exchange or service you completed KYC on. Perhaps you paid in person for a good or service from one of those addresses, or on a site which has your email and IP addresses. Perhaps your wallet is using a server I control, and I can see your IP address that way.

Page here for more info: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy

Yes its close to being anonymous but the norm system developed pretty much prevents the that anonymity. Yes, it'd be hard to trace, but only hard, not impossible. The difficulty lies on tracing the numerous amount of wallets that passed through the exchange. P2P and decentralized doesn't have this problem, but centralized exchanges have this kind of system. You can see this by checking out some hacks that have happened in the past, and where exchanges are able to trace where the said coins were, albeit not all of them.

The longer bitcoin will exist the more we loss its anonymity as the government will regulate it and with strict regulation, we will be able to comply with the KYC and pass the requirement of the exchanges. In blockchain, we are anonymous but in the eyes of the regulars, we are not.

In short the anonymity we have is limited to those who can see in the dark, for most people addresses in the blockchain is different to another when in fact it is very possible to know however people behind exchanges can barely see it especially when we have our own identity passed to them, everything that goes in and out are being recorded and is traceable to the account. We are not really anonymous, we just think it the easy way escaping the fiat's one disadvantage.

Maybe you are talking about Monero? Bitcoin is easy traceble

Stop using centralized services then and start supporting real p2p and decentralized ones. That's how you decrease government control and, at the same time, increase privacy. You're not anonymous on blockchain. In fact, if you take the wrong steps and no precaution, even Monero doesn't make you anonymous. Everything has some steps you have to check if you truly want your identity to be preserved.

Lawmakers, regulators will always look for a way to deprive you from privacy and anonymity. If you're willing to hide in a shadow, you become their target - simple as that. If you keep up with their requirements and under their control, you'll likely be left alone.

Thanks for this lovely explanation. So BTC is not anonymous its pseudonymous. Since we can be tracked by our wallet address not by our physical ids.