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> Untraceable theft from your wallet Theft is traceable (by looking at the blockchain). Theft is untraceable in the fiat system, because you don't have access

> Untraceable theft from your wallet Theft is traceable (by looking at the blockchain). Theft is untraceable in the fiat system, because you don't have access to the bank's coffers to check they've not pilfered your money. Turns out they never had the coffers anyway, your money is just some number on a screen, and there are people who have the ability to change those number arbitrarily. If you take the right steps to secure your bitcoin private key, it doesn't even need to exist in digital form, or physical form, ever. It can be purely inside your head. It's just a number. One which the probability of somebody guessing correctly is unimaginably small. > Unregulated merchants who aren't incentivized to play by the rules The same is true for fiat money. Scammers exist, and if you get scammed, you will usually be stuck for months without access to your funds while some third party performs an "investigation" (In paypal's case, "investigation" means return money to the buyer). How about unregulated "customers" who are not incentivized to play by the rules? Credit card fraud is a huge cost to businesses. > No third-party intermediary in the event you get ripped off. The correct term is choice of third-party intermediary (or not). Bitcoin does not force an escrow on you, but allows you to choose whether or not to use one, and who to use. This process can be conducted digitally with multisig transactiton outputs. > (This depends on your stance with these issues. Not everyone feels the same as you). Feels are overrated. What are you going to do about it? We've already seen that action is worse than inaction in drug wars. If you think that paying for porn is immoral, what about the morality of you declaring unilaterally that you are cutting off the income of women because you don't like them getting naked in front of a camera?

jcranmer 8y ago
> Theft is traceable (by looking at the blockchain). So the people who stole the money from Mt. Gox are currently sitting in jail, right? This also shows the doublethink you sometimes see with cryptocurrency: it's totally anonymous, and so you can use it for privacy, except for when it's not, so you can use the immutable record to figure out who harmed you.
- sparkie 8y ago
  I was referring to the ability to discover that your funds have been stolen, not necessarily who stole them. (The latter usually doesn't matter, you probably won't see the money again). The fiat system has no ability to monitor for theft. Theft can go on for years unnoticed, and by the time it is noticed, the entitiy involved may be insolvent, having a bigger effect on many people, or even the larger society if the entities are big enough. Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. If you trade through AML compliant entities, your details will be linked to transactions, and people might be able to discover who you transact with based on the public transaction information. With coinjoin and similar fungibility enhancements, that process of tracking is made far more difficult towards impossible. Also, the Lightning Network enables anonymous payments through an onion routed network, where the only public information is who you have open channels with. Anonymity will become the norm in Bitcoin even if it not the case yet. If you look at it from the perspective of a merchant, rather than from a "consumer protection" point of view, then a merchant generally does not know who defrauded them with stolen credit cards. In general, it is rarely worth investigating and businesses will generally count their losses. Entities like Paypal are notoriously bad for the seller as they side with the buyer most of the time - it isn't their money so they don't need to take it seriously. Bitcoin will benefit merchants, who can take payments which are irreversible, except by their own decisions for refunding. Consumers will need to take a bit more responsibility to vet the reputations of the merchants they deal with, instead of always being bailed out for their poor decisions.
thisisit 8y ago
Sure it is possible in Bitcoin. But Monero is frequently used as prime example of an untraceable cryptocurrency. The reason is because of Monero's technology. But in the same vein any stolen Monero cannot be traced.

jcranmer 8y ago

> Theft is traceable (by looking at the blockchain). So the people who stole the money from Mt. Gox are currently sitting in jail, right? This also shows the doublethink you sometimes see with cryptocurrency: it's totally anonymous, and so you can use it for privacy, except for when it's not, so you can use the immutable record to figure out who harmed you.

sparkie 8y ago
I was referring to the ability to discover that your funds have been stolen, not necessarily who stole them. (The latter usually doesn't matter, you probably won't see the money again). The fiat system has no ability to monitor for theft. Theft can go on for years unnoticed, and by the time it is noticed, the entitiy involved may be insolvent, having a bigger effect on many people, or even the larger society if the entities are big enough. Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. If you trade through AML compliant entities, your details will be linked to transactions, and people might be able to discover who you transact with based on the public transaction information. With coinjoin and similar fungibility enhancements, that process of tracking is made far more difficult towards impossible. Also, the Lightning Network enables anonymous payments through an onion routed network, where the only public information is who you have open channels with. Anonymity will become the norm in Bitcoin even if it not the case yet. If you look at it from the perspective of a merchant, rather than from a "consumer protection" point of view, then a merchant generally does not know who defrauded them with stolen credit cards. In general, it is rarely worth investigating and businesses will generally count their losses. Entities like Paypal are notoriously bad for the seller as they side with the buyer most of the time - it isn't their money so they don't need to take it seriously. Bitcoin will benefit merchants, who can take payments which are irreversible, except by their own decisions for refunding. Consumers will need to take a bit more responsibility to vet the reputations of the merchants they deal with, instead of always being bailed out for their poor decisions.

thisisit 8y ago

Sure it is possible in Bitcoin. But Monero is frequently used as prime example of an untraceable cryptocurrency. The reason is because of Monero's technology. But in the same vein any stolen Monero cannot be traced.