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I'm always surprised how people seem to focus on bitcoin's alleged anonymity. It was quite clear from the beginning that bitcoin is not completely anonymous, o

I'm always surprised how people seem to focus on bitcoin's alleged anonymity. It was quite clear from the beginning that bitcoin is not completely anonymous, or rather that it is not more anonymous than internet itself is. Just as you don't have to give your name or a photocopy of your passport to register to a website, you don't have to do that either to use bitcoin. So to a degree it is anonymous, but only when compared to other payments systems like Paypal for instance. This relative anonymity is not what attracted the vast majority of bitcoin users anyway. It was more the idea of a public, decentralized ledger.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
>> it is not more anonymous than internet itself is It's less anonymous than that. Not a 100% accurate analogy but this would be similar to having your browsing history stored in a public location mapped to your IPs.
- sirsar 10y ago
  >> your browsing history stored in a public location mapped to your IPs. It's more anonymous than that. Most people can't change their IP, let alone generate a new IP address for every single page load.
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    like I said, not the best analogy, but.... you can go through a proxy or reboot your cable modem for example and because your web site hits are not linked (contrary to blockchain txs linked back all the way to where you acquired the coins) - I'd argue that this would be more anonymous than BTC.
- grondilu 10y ago
  There are no IPs in the blockchain, are there?
  - wmf 10y ago
    No, but there are third-party databases that try to track the first IP seen for each transaction.
    - grondilu 10y ago
      Well you could do that with any packet on the network, couldn't you? It's not specific to bitcoin. The transaction itself has no IP either.
      - wmf 10y ago
        P2P protocols like BitTorrent and Bitcoin are less private than client-server protocols. A random grad student in the Netherlands could track nearly every Bitcoin peer if they wanted to, but they can't track people posting to HN.
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    there are btc addresses tied to your wallet (in my analogy this would be an IP address) mapped to transactions with a major kicker being that the coin involved in these transactions is traceable back to where you acquired it and then back to where it was mined in the first place. so my analogy is actually less 'severe' than the reality of the bitcoin setup.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago

>> it is not more anonymous than internet itself is It's less anonymous than that. Not a 100% accurate analogy but this would be similar to having your browsing history stored in a public location mapped to your IPs.

sirsar 10y ago
>> your browsing history stored in a public location mapped to your IPs. It's more anonymous than that. Most people can't change their IP, let alone generate a new IP address for every single page load.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  like I said, not the best analogy, but.... you can go through a proxy or reboot your cable modem for example and because your web site hits are not linked (contrary to blockchain txs linked back all the way to where you acquired the coins) - I'd argue that this would be more anonymous than BTC.
grondilu 10y ago
There are no IPs in the blockchain, are there?
- wmf 10y ago
  No, but there are third-party databases that try to track the first IP seen for each transaction.
  - grondilu 10y ago
    Well you could do that with any packet on the network, couldn't you? It's not specific to bitcoin. The transaction itself has no IP either.
    - wmf 10y ago
      P2P protocols like BitTorrent and Bitcoin are less private than client-server protocols. A random grad student in the Netherlands could track nearly every Bitcoin peer if they wanted to, but they can't track people posting to HN.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  there are btc addresses tied to your wallet (in my analogy this would be an IP address) mapped to transactions with a major kicker being that the coin involved in these transactions is traceable back to where you acquired it and then back to where it was mined in the first place. so my analogy is actually less 'severe' than the reality of the bitcoin setup.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]