Bitcoin is only 'potentially anonymous' and then only if both you and anyone you ever trade value with has PERFECT OpSec. The public ledger aspect means that a

Bitcoin is only 'potentially anonymous' and then only if both you and anyone you ever trade value with has PERFECT OpSec. The public ledger aspect means that as soon as the identity of anyone in the chain is pinned it is merely a question of how much effort is desired to track down who that value was sent to / from. I'm not against those as features of a platform, I'm just realistic about Bitcoin /NOT/ being anonymous. What I am against is the perversion of proof of work from something that is optimal on a /generic/ computing platform to something that is dominated by ASICs and 'entry level' on GPUs. Speculation related to bitcoin has caused so much wasted power and driven up the cost of hardware that could otherwise be far more economical for it's intended uses. At least if the work had been based around CPUs we'd be seeing /that/ market scale up which I believe both has more capacity to scale up and would also be more beneficial to the long term results. (It would be much nicer if the 'work' were mixture of proofing the ledger AND something actually scientifically useful, examples including the old protein folding, SETI, and prime number searching projects.)