4 ms·

How different is this _really_ from storing money in my checking account? The bank doesn't allocate individual stacks of bills for each account, they just have

• cesarb 9y ago
  A checking account is closer to the intuitive "this account has X amount of money"; the transactions are "add X money to the account" and "subtract X money to the account". With Bitcoin, it's as if you had thousands of tiny checking accounts, every time you received money created a new one, and you could withdraw each account only once, and always for the full value (if you wanted to use only part of an account, you had to send the rest to a new account).
• yebyen 9y ago
  The main difference is that anyone can create a practically untraceable address as many times as they want. So if you have a lot of tainted Bitcoin and you want to obscure the source without risking putting it through a mixer, you can create N addresses and start sending coin to (and through) them. Compared to checking accounts; I can't just generate a thousand checking accounts that don't belong to any identity and generate a transaction history that appears to show many transactions occurred between hundreds of parties. It's still not as good as mixing with other Bitcoin of alternate origin (if I only have the tainted coins at the beginning, I will still have 1000 accounts with only all of the same tainted coins when I am done, and a careful analysis will show that these 1000 addresses were funded entirely by the original tainted coins). But each seller cannot be expected to perform this careful analysis, and as you are able to exchange known tainted coins for clean coins and mix them, you can increase the uncertainty that a legitimate transaction is taking place that is separate from the one that originally generated your ownership of the tainted coins.
• rini17 9y ago
  If the bank worked kinda like bitcoin, it would track serial numbers of all unspent bills deposited into the account.