Bitcoin IS anonymous

[allinvain]

Thanks guys for vindicating and proving my point.

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[westkybitcoins]

I'd say that bitcoin can be far more anonymous than gold.

You don't really have that much experience with using cash or gold do you?

And I suppose you do? How do you draw that judgement based on my statement is beyond me. When you buy gold you typically have to provide some real world proof of id or some info about you (assuming you did not fake it) gets left behind at the merchant or point of purchase. With bitcoin what info info about you is stored? Your e-mail address? Your IP? Get real man, bitcoin IS anonymous.

I've never had to provide ID, background info, or even my name when buying gold, although I chose to once or twice by buying via debit card. Just find a brick-and-mortar shop that sells gold. Take cash. Buy smallish amounts. Nothing to it.

If you want to spend a lot, either first build up a rapport with the shop owner over time, or look for several more out-of-the-way places to buy from. (Look hard. Odd downtown shops and flea markets can surprise you.)

True enough, and that's what I was saying in one of my previous posts. But keep in mind that you are still exposing your visual identity (ie your face) to the shop keeper. In that sense it is not 100% anonymous. You'd be surprised how good some people's memory can be.

I think it's a bad idea that the gold shops you frequent don't ask for id - ie money laundering.

I strongly disagree.

Setting aside for a moment the actual "wrongness" of obscuring one's finances in the first place....

If the little old lady selling some silver coins and a couple of 1/10 ounce gold eagles at the flea market asks for ID before selling to anyone, she's going to go home without having made a sale. She doesn't need anyone else's ID, and frankly, the harm she could do with it is far greater than the harm I'm going to do buying a few hundred dollars worth of metal.

Ditto to the traditional, reputable coin shop. It's not uncommon to show ID when selling a lot of metal, or jewelry or the like, on the off chance you're fencing stolen goods. But buying? What would be the point of looking at the name of someone who buys a gold coin? It's not like the mafia or drug cartels (or your neighborhood drug dealer, I would imagine) do business in gold. Last I heard they had a preference for euros....

The gist of my argument is that it is a lot easier to leave no traces in the digital world than in the physical world - hence anything do in "real life" carries the risk of compromising your "anonymity"

I agree, using a physical money requires some sort of physical presence and interaction at some point. I was just pointing out that, at least here in the U.S. (for now, anyway), using gold can be fairly anonymous.

[westkybitcoins]

I wonder if they do this for non US Citizens as well.

I'm fairly certain they do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence)

[Big Time Coin]

We can all assume that every single thing we do on the internet, phone calls we make, credit card purchases, our location (from our cell phones), bank transactions, pretty much every electronic transaction, travel patterns, and on and on....are stored and analyzed WITHOUT A COURT ORDER.

See http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying just for starts.  You should assume that the traffic analysis discussed here is already being done on the blockchain at a minimum.

Thanks for blowing the whistle early on mybitcoin lettucebee, you saved me a hundred coin at least!.  Still lost 40 or so I was about to transfer to an offline wallet.  I discovered the site was down on the day it first went down when I went to log-in for the final transfer and close my account. 

Anyway, to respond to the quoted post, lettucebee, none of that information is admissible in court.  It isn't usable as the basis for a warrant, either.  It is also unavailable to civilian investigators.  Since the bitcoin frauds are not national security matters, the NSA is not going to retarget their datamining, nor will they help with the investigation in any way.

So some datamining AI sifts through all the traffic and sends up the "suspicious" bits through the heirarchy of human review within the U.S. intelligence community to try to prevent terrorism and improve "national security".  So what, it doesn't mean bitcoin is not anonymous just because some super spy-computer could, in theory, link btc to real id.

[lettucebee]

I think it's a misdirection to say things like "bitcoin is (or isn't) anonymous".  This is a point garzik has made before.  What makes it hard to find "Tom Williams" bitcoin is that he used multiple techniques to hide his true identity: an entity (corporation) formed in a jurisdiction friendly to anonymous corporations, a host that accepts a pseudonym, a software application that gave him access to people's coins but that gave no way to reach him, and so on.

It was his lifestyle choices that made him anonymous, not bitcoin.  I'm not saying anything you folks don't know, but we should be more precise with our language.  And last, Tom went to a lot of work to be able to cloak himself this well.  Few people would be able to go through with it all.