As you know, Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency, there were several before. The idea of a decentralized currency dates back to the 1990s and 2000s. Cypherpunks, Crypto-anarchist, and cryptographers are the real people behind the idea and advocating privacy
for several decades now [1]
Yes, the world may know the origin (sending wallet), the amount that was transacted and even the destination (receiving wallet). But that's all there is to it.
Not really, if you use a web-based wallet, an exchange platform, and similar I can know from where you coins where sent and where they have been receiving. It can be pretty easy to know this
Take for example the "cache & cookies disclaimer"
I am crying when I see any, oh man it killed my surfing activity, it gets my nerves really:/
Breach of privacy was a problem of great concern, and great minds understood that it has to be addressed. And as many of us loved the Incognito Mode of Google Chrome, Blockchain brought us pseudonymity for crypto transactions
There is an adage saying "Years ago, it was costly to get any information online, now it's costly to get it private"
The pseudonymity the blockchain tech gives us is not only for crypto transactions you need to have a broader vision. It's for your financial privacy.
The pseudonymity is lost as soon as you cash out your bitcoin to a bank, true that. However I am going to tell you a truth: the majority doesn't care about privacy, Bitcoin is their cash cow, see yourself they are even ready to send a selfie with their ID card to any ramdom website they never heard of.
How many tools we have focusing on privacy? From operating systems to browsers, email services, CMS, ISP, and so on... Almost nobody is using any, but still yelling online when something happens like the facebook scandal.
@franky1
I always like reading your opinions but can you stop to complain about LN, I will start to think you are paid by Roger Ver if you continue
[1]
However, we have to go back several decades to understand the true origins of this technology and its eponymous currency.
In the 1990s, as the Internet truly emerged for the general public, a group of mathematicians, cryptographers, computer scientists, and hackers formed to advocate for the protection of privacy, particularly through the use of cryptography. The “cypherpunks“, including the creators of Wikileaks, militate for the use of encryption tools in order to avoid the growing risks of intrusion by states or private companies into the private lives of individuals.
Cypherpunks
Timothy May is one of the major contributors to the Cypherpunk mailing-list, on which he broadcast in 1992 The Crypto-anarchist Manifesto written in 1988, a founding and visionary text with a libertarian tendency, which brilliantly describes the digital revolution we are currently living.
“Cypherpunks think privacy is a good thing,” writes Tim May, “and want more privacy. They recognize that those who want privacy must afford it and not simply expect governments, corporations or other huge, faceless organizations to give them privacy out of benevolence. Cypherpunks know that people have had to create their own private lives for centuries, with murmurs, envelopes, closed doors and secret mails.
A year later, Eric Hughes, one of the members of the small group now called cypherpunk, published a crypto-anarchist manifesto, A Cypherpunk Manifesto. He, in turn, takes up the idea that privacy must be preserved from the possible drifts of the Net and that the system of anonymous exchanges must be generalized
He, therefore, calls on all cypherpunks to write encryption programs to protect themselves from illegal wiretapping by governments or companies. Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age, he wrote prophetically. Privacy is no secret, however. A private matter is something that you don’t want everyone to know about, whereas a secret matter is something that no one should know about. Privacy is, therefore, the power to select those to whom the world will be revealed. The major texts of this current are all accessible on the Nakamoto Institute website.
Based on public algorithms, the most famous encryption solutions were born in the 1990s and have continued to develop and gain legitimacy. Having reached a stage of maturity, but still insufficiently adopted by the general public, these solutions can enable anyone to protect their correspondence and sign their exchanges, data or documents electronically.
One of their fundamental strengths lies in their independence from any central entity. The trust established between two people is based solely on mathematics, which makes it possible to free oneself from any trusted third party, state or private.
At the same time, the Internet has seen many innovations appear on its network, such as the web, email, and voice over IP. Available to all, these technologies are largely based on our digital uses and are all based on open technology protocols. However, while electronic payment services appeared in the 1980s with magnetic stripe and then chip bank cards, no open technology has specifically come to offer alternatives to these tools on the Internet.
Initiatives for monetary systems and autonomous payments have not been lacking since the 2000s, with almost successful proposals such as B-money or Bit Gold. Designed by Nick Szabo in 1998, Bit Gold is a decentralized digital money initiative that operates extremely close to Bitcoin, but has not managed to solve the classic problem of double spending perfectly (Nick Szabo remains one of the most listened to figures in the Bitcoin community and is often even presented as the real Nakamoto).
