Every so often, the distinction between anonymity and privacy comes up, and I recently tried to bring a few ideas together on this in an article suggesting that privacy in the Bitcoin economy often winds up either being conflated with anonymity or being set aside in the implicit belief that if you take care of the anonymity, then the privacy will take care of itself. In my view, this is pretty far from the truth.
The article suggests that preoccupation with anonymity risks both undermining privacy itself and impeding the wider acceptance of Bitcoins as a currency for conducting business. Many people in the broader economy are far more concerned with their privacy than with the capability to conduct transactions anonymously, and unfortunately many of the makeshift solutions which have been developed to address the challenges which
anonymity creates actually risk making
privacy in the Bitcoin economy worse, rather than better.
The article also touches on the extent to which increasingly powerful network analyis tools mean that each identification of a link between a real person and a single transaction -- i.e., identification of one vertex in an overall flow of transactions -- could potentially impact the privacy of
other people and
other transactions.
The full article is here:
In the Bitcoin Economy, Anonymity and Privacy are Not the Same ThingThoughts, comments, criticisms all welcome...
