Bitcoin Forum

Over the years, people have interchangeably mixed up Privacy and Anonymity in regard to Bitcoin transactions. My native language is not English, so I would like to know from community members. Which is the right word to use?

According to Oxford Dictionary;

Privacy

Here's what I think. Since the Bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger, transactions are not private, anyone can observe any transaction and any address using blockchain explorers. So even if the owners of the sending and receiving addresses are not known, the transaction is still not private. People can still be able to see the amount of Bitcoin spent and the time it was spent.

Anonymous

Anonymity from Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity)

So long as the addresses involved are not connected to any centralized service. There is no way the public can know about the identity of the sender and receiver of a bitcoin transaction. Therefore, i think bitcoin transactions are sometimes anonymous and not private

What do you think, members?

If the transaction is not linked to your identity, it is still because you maintain privacy because no one will disturb you of anything. No thief will come to your house for your coin. If you have ways to increase your privacy online and no one will know about you, which means no one will disturb you. Only what they can see on ledger are transactions, not you, which means privacy.

No, it is private pseudonymous, not private not anonymous. Example of anonymous transactions are that of monero in which no record of public ledger, so nothing known about the transaction.

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Do not get it confused. The question people always ask is 'is Bitcoin transaction anonymous? Not is 'the person making use of Bitcoin anonymous'? Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous but the person making use of it in a way the Bitcoin is not linked to him is anonymous, while the person needs to maintain privacy in order to remain anonymous, but Bitcoin transaction itself is not anonymous.

Being anonymous is staying unknown to the world. This means what we've done is visible to the world, but who has done is unknown to the world.

When we talk about privacy. It is a concealed think, only if the person himself reveals it gets known to the rest. As of now anonymity is the term that is right for the usage with bitcoin as it doesn't provide with the perfect privacy for the user.

I mean, how do you maintain privacy minus people tracking your address? As soon as you buy BTC let's say using p2p. It means the other party who sold you the Bitcoins now knows your address and how you are probably going to spend Bitcoins in your transactions, even if you are anonymous.

I don't think that's privacy. The bitcoin blockchain is transparent. I personally don't think transparency and privacy can be in the same sentence, but transparency and anonymity can.


What you are saying about Monero transactions is that they are rather private and anonymous if the parties in the transaction decide to be anonymous. Anything or transaction that has no public record or can't be viewed by the public is private, but something or transaction or donation can be anonymous and at the same time the transaction or what is donated can be viewed by the public.

Am not confused but from my understanding an anonymous transaction is a right term too, just like you have heard about an anonymous donation (you know what the donation is but the person who sent it is anonymous)

you just have to avoid any transactions that will make you input your name. this is hard to do whenever you want to cash out actually. p2p isn't private too. just like exchanges, they keep records. when kyc is submitted, they own it.

keep an account where you can disclose to any 3rd party which has enough funds no one will bat an eye. then also create a wallet where you could also keep privacy.

If you send bitcoins to a merchant (for example), who isn't "centralized service", the public can still know your identity if the merchant makes the transaction public.

Furthermore, while individual leaks of privacy and anonymity might seem small and inconsequential, a dedicated and comprehensive effort by any entity, such as Facebook, Google, or a blockchain surveillance company, can uncover information about you and your identity, by collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data.

Bitcoin's privacy level is dependent on the user's behavior and full anonymity cannot be achieved. So I think the closest we can get is the "privacy" term, because anonymity is not present in BTC's current blockchain.

You seek privacy when you want people to simply not know why you're moving money or what other addresses you own. You seek anonymity when you want everything about your finance to be hidden.

You can't be anonymous if everything is transparent. Anonymity is wearing a full on cloak. You're hidden from others and nobody knows anything about you. Privacy means having just a little wall between you and others. They know you're there, but they can't do much more than that unless you leak crucial information yourself.

Privacy and anonymity are different and I think anonymity is at higher level than privacy.

What Satoshi Nakamoto achieved is anonymity. Satoshi managed to keep all activities on Tor and all things are anonymously. 12 years later, none of us can identify who is Satoshi Nakamoto.

If you leak your privacy, from evidence experts can trace them along the way and figure out who you are. From broken privacy, then you will likely have broken anonymity as consequences.

With bitcoin, i believe it is more of a privacy thing than anonymity. To be private is different from being completely anonymous. If you are private, there is a restricted access to you, but if you are anonymous, there is usually no way to be accessed.

Also, you can stay private with bitcoin transactions but not completely anonymous because if need be, you can be traced by the authorities who have alligned themselves with some technologies to do so, that is not anonymity.

Actually can. How can a super careful guy whom doing a lot of bitcoin transaction using mixers can be traced without violating some terms by such third party? Unless the mixer site have a way to access customers information amd they breach their service term to give up some info regarding the customer. However this only works on crime purposes I guess.

But you have to understand that there are blockchain analysis company that can find the link of your address and identify the person itself. Perhaps the best question is how to protect our identity and what measures to make it private?

1. VPN + Tor
2. Tumbling services or bitcoin mixers
3. Wasabi, Joinmarket, Samourai

There could be more practice to really protect our anonymity and privacy.

Do you really need to combine VPN and Tor?

Only top-notch tumblers/ mixers can provide services for your private transactions and there are many scam tumblers/ mixers.

• 2021 List Bitcoin Mixers Bitcoin Tumblers Websites (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2827109.0)
• Read scam accusations on scam tumblers if you have time (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2827109.msg29058223#msg29058223)

Some sources for recommended wallets and reviews.

• Recommended wallets (https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/recommended-wallets.html)
• Wallet reviews on Cryptowisser.com (https://www.cryptowisser.com/wallets/)

There is no real anonymity with bitcoin if you are exchanging for fiat which is what 99% of people do with crypto,  and while crypto is linked to fiat there really is no "privacy" or anonymity and even if you purchase an item legitimately using only crypto there will always be a trace on it just like any other sale.

Privacy and anonymity is the same in my opinion so either word you choose it will be the same for bitcoin. Anonymity is a bit debatable though since bitcoin is sometimes considered pseudonymous.

The only way to stay as close to anonymous as possible is by never selling your coins for anything physical (or even digital such as games). As long as you sell your Bitcoins, you have cancelled your anonymity and I think there are other ways you could do this as well besides selling.

Once you buy a phone from me through BTC, even if those Bitcoins have been mixed and so, even if this happens P2P, I know your public address so I know who exactly you are on the blockchain. Monero gives you anonymity instead: besides the amount received, there is nothing you get to know about me. It's very close to cash payments, but even those are numbered (have a serie written on it).

You can't really be anonymous when a ledger is transparent, but you can definitely achieve high levels of privacy.

Bitcoin transactions are pseudo-anonymous which means its, not 100% anonymity and you can be traced in some way even if you mixed the coin if you involved in something highly offensive as per the laws but it gives privacy to anyone who wanted, they no need to visit a bank to make a transaction and also the receiver no need to reveal his identity to receive money.

Bitcoin transactions are not private, privacy is about someone not being able to observe and document those actions, the blockchain is public, there is no privacy about transactions, the only thing that makes them semi-anonymous is that you can't link the sending address to a person in most cases. Bank transfers are private, only you and the receiver or sender will know about that transfer, nobody is able to monitor it freely, the merchant that has got 100$ from you won't be able to look at a chain and see all the payments you have made in your entire history from that bank account, but the same time they are not anonymous since they are linked to your name and ID details.


And how do you keep your privacy when you spend those coins?

Mixers are being used to break the links when somebody wants to trace your movement, so :
I get paid by X, I use a mixer, I buy something from Y, no matter how closely you watch all the payments made by X you will never find out one of his employees bought something from Y. That doesn't change the fact that X knows who I am , and that doesn't change the fact that Y also does as I went to him to buy the stuff or he had it delivered to my home

I don't think it's a language problem. At least, in my native language there are also two separate words for privacy and anonymity, so the issue of choosing the proper word persists. If we treat anonymity as merely the lack of identification by name, then Bitcoin can indeed by used anonymously. However, since all transactions are publicly available, it seems weird to call it an anonymous currency, so the term 'pseudonymous' is preferred. As for privacy, Bitcoin allows for some precisely because the transactions are not automatically linked to one's real identity, but it also doesn't seem to be the best word for describing Bitcoin because transactions can be easily traced and observed by anyone.

Make sense. Just curious how many are still can manage to keep their anonymity from everyome except Satoshi. So indeed you also give up that, everyone must have sell their bitcoin right?

Cant disageee with that cause you are right but keeping it as long as I can is the preventive way of keeping my privacy somehow.

Do not mind me there, the blockchain is open to be public, so it is public, not private. Which means bitcoin transactions are public, but yet pseudonymous because the transactions can only be accessible on blockchain but can not be linked to the person making the transaction(s) if the the person is maintaining privacy while such person making the transaction can be regarded as anonymous, because who made the transaction is not known.

I think you can gain benefit from bitcoin both anonymously and privately. I actually do not see any difference between the two. When you enter bitcoin, your anonymisity is ensured already. No one can ever know any personal details about you as long as you do not expose it explicitly. You do not have to worry about your security as long as you stay careful, it is one of the advantage of making payments in crypto. Some people such as criminals take this opportunity so that they can commit crimes and make payments with illegal items without having their identity exposed.

Yeah. I suspect this is the reason Satoshi never sold his coins. By selling, you're potentially compromising your anonymity and he/they definitely never wanted that. If you want to be anonymous witb BTC, either never sell or do it through Bisq only (although I am not 100% sure Bisq is very strong against exit node attacks and other vulnerabilities/attack vectors?).

It's all about time before you can get to somehow, with maximum care, keep your BTC anonymous from start to end. Once XMR <-> BTC atomic swaps get real, it's gonna be very easy to keep BTC with no traces of your identity. You just swap from XMR to BTC, hodl it and when you want to sell, move back to XMR and nobody will know a thing.

Incorrect. Anonymity can never be guaranteed through using Bitcoin and I'd go as far as to say that it is almost never achieved with the activities that the average Joe would engage it. There are various points of failure present when one is trying to cover their track by disassociating various transactions from each other and that can be exploitable. The "degree" of anonymity that you can achieve is dependent on the various precautions and/or measures that you take to try to ensure your anonymity. With sufficient resources and if you're a person of interest, you'd have to go through even more loops to which I'll say that you're better off trying to use a crypto that is focused on your privacy.

Actually, I think that anonymity and privacy are both fitting words. Because normally, it can't be known which transaction belongs to whom. And they can't be disturbed by other people too.

The two words are closely related to each other, but in the case of Bitcoin I think the correct word is “Anonymity” because the Blockchain is also transparent as the history of all transactions, the addresses of senders and recipients that were sent to them, as well as the timing and quantity that was sent, can also be known as the balance of a Bitcoin address since It was created so it cannot be said that this is complete privacy although the identity of the sender and receiver is unknown, so it is more correct to use the word "Anonymity".

How is anonymity the correct word when Bitcoin is transparent? Privacy is when you want someone not to know what you're doing in the bathroom; anonymity is when you want someone not to know you're in the bathroom at all.

The expressions may differ in different languages ​​and people as well, for me I see that privacy is that no one knows anything about you at all and anonymity means that people can know what you are doing without knowing who you are.
In Bitcoin, you can know the address, date and quantity without knowing who owns this address or the person who made the transfer, and this is called anonymous in our language.
Privacy varies according to different people and their vision, because some people see knowing the address, date and quantity as a violation of privacy, while others do not mind that because what is important to them is that their true identity is not known.
I hope I have been able to clarify my point.

We talk about Pseudo-anonymity, where you appear to be anonymous, but in reality you are not 100% anonymous. The moment when you link your Bitcoin address to some third party service where your real identity can be tracked, your anonymity is gone. So, if you buy your bitcoins through a regulated third party... you have zero anonymity.  ::)

Even if you bought your bitcoins through an anonymous source, you lose your anonymity when you pay for a product or service where they require your real identity.  :P  (Casinos / Merchants / Hardware wallet providers etc)

The transaction are anonymitly carried out and privately owned. Whichever word is used here is correct to be honest, I think the technology of Bitcoin is more important than the right word to use. Your identity can still be exposed by a third-party involved in the peer to peer transaction, for example there must be a sender and a receiver for a Bitcoin transaction to happen. Wouldn't there be a mutual discussion for the Bitcoin transaction to happen? It is just private to me.