>It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How

>It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How is that remotely anonymous? It's not anonymous anymore. Transactions are being tracked to the ip addresses they originated from. This tracking has been going on since 2014[0] From the article: >But there is no top-down coordination of the Bitcoin network, and its flow is far from perfect. The Koshys noticed that sometimes a computer sent out information about only one transaction, meaning that the person at that IP address was the owner of that Bitcoin address. And sometimes a surge of transactions came from a single IP address—probably when the user was upgrading his or her Bitcoin client software. Those transactions held the key to a whole backlog of their Bitcoin addresses. Like unraveling a ball of string, once the Koshys isolated some of the addresses, others followed. > >Ultimately, they were able to map IP addresses to more than 1000 Bitcoin addresses; they published their findings in the proceedings of an obscure cryptography conference. .... [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-h...