Warning: blockchain.info may register you IP, even if you don't use them!

[MPOE-PR]

This is presently true, but only because Bitcoin is still a new, obscure, and therefore unregulated system. As it gets more widely adopted, there will be more attempts to regulate and monitor transactions. Much like a business today is typically required to collect and report information about certain fiat transactions, in the future same AML requirements may apply to businesses within the "bitcoin system".

This will absolutely never happen. The system allowing such bs would be by definition a fork of Bitcoin, and a pretty irrelevant/hopeless one at that.

[niko]

This is presently true, but only because Bitcoin is still a new, obscure, and therefore unregulated system. As it gets more widely adopted, there will be more attempts to regulate and monitor transactions. Much like a business today is typically required to collect and report information about certain fiat transactions, in the future same AML requirements may apply to businesses within the "bitcoin system".

This will absolutely never happen. The system allowing such bs would be by definition a fork of Bitcoin, and a pretty irrelevant/hopeless one at that.

No fork needed, I was writing about factors external to Bitcoin and its protocol. As for irrelevance - today's credit cards are far worse, and may be irrelevant in your view, but hundreds of millions of them are in use.

[davout]

registering and storing transient information that would not normally be available later.

That's pretty much the whole point of the internet.

[Red Emerald]

But the moment I run my node through Tor, noone else can connect to it, and I am not contributing to the Bitcoin network.

I still think that anyone who has truly something to hide should hide behind Tor, but it is annoying that the rest of us have to just to conserve our privacy.  I know a government or somebody resourceful could collect this IP info themselves.  But the average weirdo with an axe to grind probably can't - or if he can, then he cannot get this kind of info for transactions in the past, except that blockchain.info serves it on a silver platter.  And he might not give a damn about "plausible deniability".

To summarize:

• If you run a full node, blockchain.info is likely to register your IP with your transactions (diluted by whatever transactions you relay).
  
• If you really care about this, run Tor.  At the price of making your ISP believe you watch child pornography (just kidding)
  
• Some of us think that blockchain.info should stop publishing this otherwise transient IP information.  Others disagree.
  

Read the doc I linked. Your node can still be open for connections AND behind Tor. It's been this way for like 8 months.