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Bitcoin's Success With Investors Alienates Earliest Adopters
holy_calamity writes "Digital currency Bitcoin is gaining acceptance with mainstream venture capitalists, reports Technology Review, but at the price of its famed anonymity and ability to operate without central authority. Technology investors have now ploughed millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin-based payments and financial companies that are careful to follow financial regulations and don't offer anonymity. That's causing tensions in the community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, some of whom feel their currency's success has involved abandoning its most important features."
...I've got a bridge somewhere that needs to be sold that you might be interested in.
Bitcoin does irrefutability (i.e. the ability to prove that a transaction occurred, and occurred only once). I can thus prove that I do, in fact, own all Bitcoin I possess.
It never has been anonymous. There are characteristics that make it more difficult to trace the payer, but the protocol and implementation have never been configured (or designed) to be a strongly anonymous technology.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
If you associate that data with a person, they're forever tied to that transaction and you can follow it.
Yes and no. Once you associate "me" with a transaction, you can always prove I owned part of block B at time T. You can't, however, prove that when I "spent" those bitcoins, I did or did not simply send them to myself, making anonymity (at least, at the "plausible deniability" level) always just one easy transaction away.
And for the really paranoid, you can use any of a dozen "mixing" services, that take your bitcoins along with those of thousands of other people and stir them all together to make tracing the ones you put in to the ones you take out as close to impossible as matters.
You don't need to put your coins into a laundry if you use zerocoins instead. End of problem. Whoever wrote this article (and everyone commenting) doesn't know how to do a little research. Total anonymity and pseudymity are possible.
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}