"One of the big selling points of Bitcoin originally was privacy" Really? I would say that the primary, and basically only, selling point was the lack of a ce

"One of the big selling points of Bitcoin originally was privacy" Really? I would say that the primary, and basically only, selling point was the lack of a central authority (I think it is interesting that Bitcoin was announced during a major financial crisis that shook confidence in the banking system). Satoshi stated this in the original whitepaper and took the time to explain the concept of electronic payments without central banks on the cryptography mailing list. Privacy seems to have been unimportant to Satoshi, who basically left it as an open problem (he speculated that something like an anonymous remailer could be created for Bitcoin, and ultimately such things were created). As I say every time this comes up, the Bitcoin whitepaper makes no mention of the work on e-cash, which is telling for two reasons. First, it means that Satoshi was probably not very familiar with the academic research on cryptography and almost certainly was not involved in the cryptography research community (so we can eliminate Hal Finney, among others). Second, it means Satoshi probably was not very interested in payment privacy, since anyone who did even a cursory review of previous work would have come across David Chaum's work on e-cash or his Digicash startup. The fact that Satoshi used remailers and PGP does not mean he was someone who cared deeply about privacy; it just means he was a cryptography enthusiast.