4 ms·

Bitcoin is actually worse than this. Bitcoin is easily traceable and doesn’t solve the “anonymous money” problem that cold hard cash solves. Not only is Bitcoin

by vxNsr 4y ago

Bitcoin is actually worse than this. Bitcoin is easily traceable and doesn’t solve the “anonymous money” problem that cold hard cash solves. Not only is Bitcoin easily traceable the record exists forever and is impossible to erase. There are other crypto products that attempt to solve this issue but Bitcoin is definitely not one of them.

redox99 4y ago
Bitcoin is much better in that it's pseudonymous (instead of 100% associated to your real identity) and cannot be censored (instead of your government being able to freeze your funds, only allow transferring from/to X, up to Y amount, etc).
- etchalon 4y ago
  Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant. Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable.
  - MerelyMortal 4y ago
    Bitcoin is censorable, and it has been censored in the past by miners refusing to include transactions that they viewed as spam. Because Bitcoin transactions are public, they can be discriminated against.
    - kragen 4y ago
      It takes a "51% attack" majority of miners to refuse to include a transaction, and then only if they're willing to reject blocks mined by others that include it, at the risk of their own blocks being rejected by full nodes (like Coinbase's and Binance's) if their 51% majority turns out not to be as solid as they thought it was. As far as I know this has never happened; the only transactions I've seen excluded from the blockchain are unanimous things like the spam transactions you're talking about.
  - jondwillis 4y ago
    Yeah, Bitcoin doesn’t typically make sense for avoidance purposes while you are still interfacing with centralized entities. It was always supposed to be p2p but has largely failed at that because there’s no real need for most people’s use case (speculation.)
  - redox99 4y ago
    > Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant. How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous. And before you say "yeah but nobody does that", I do that and a lot of people in my country do that. > Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable. I don't see the point here? If it's no longer bitcoin then of course it's properties don't apply anymore. By the way I don't consider Bitcoin specifically a good replacement because it's not scalable, but my point applies to other potentially similar but scalable cryptocurrencies (maybe ETH in the future if they figure out scalability)
    - etchalon 4y ago
      > If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous. It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used. This is fairly rudimentary forensics work, and an unmaskable, centralized store of all transactions makes it trivial. > I don't see the point here? "Anti-censorship" properties that are worthless in real-world usage seem to be a fairly important flaw if we're talking about a technologies anti-censorship properties.
      - redox99 4y ago
        > It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used. How is that? Let's say I go to PornHub and purchase premium (which is only purchasable with crypto). Assume tor usage to not have to worry about any kind of side channel identity leak. How could PornHub know who I am? At most, if the person who sold me the crypto face to face messed up and the address he used to send me the coins becomes identified, PornHub could assume A) This is another address of his or B) This is the address of someone he conducted business with Either way you would need to personally inquire him to leak my identity, in case he even knows it. And this is assuming a trivial case without the use of mixers and so on. Ideally you would want your wallet software to automatically handle all this stuff, and automatically clean your coins for you, generate new addresses, etc without you even knowing.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Crypto now means Coinbase the same way that email now means Gmail. But it doesn't have to be that way. Protocols > Platforms.
    - kragen 4y ago
      Nobody here in Argentina uses Coinbase; they all use Binance.
      - llanowarelves 4y ago
        Interesting. Yeah it's a few different exchanges + banks. The dependency on platforms is the problem here.
        kragen 4y ago
        I agree that it's a problem, but an oligopoly like that is much less of a problem than a Gmail-style near-monopoly would be.
- wolongong942 4y ago
  In reality it isn't pseudonymous though, because 99% of users are on centralized KYC exchanges for convenience.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Maybe 99% of the users you know. When LocalBitcoins imposed KYC everyone in Argentina switched to Binance.

by vxNsr 4y ago

redox99 4y ago

Bitcoin is much better in that it's pseudonymous (instead of 100% associated to your real identity) and cannot be censored (instead of your government being able to freeze your funds, only allow transferring from/to X, up to Y amount, etc).

etchalon 4y ago
Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant. Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
  Bitcoin is censorable, and it has been censored in the past by miners refusing to include transactions that they viewed as spam. Because Bitcoin transactions are public, they can be discriminated against.
  - kragen 4y ago
    It takes a "51% attack" majority of miners to refuse to include a transaction, and then only if they're willing to reject blocks mined by others that include it, at the risk of their own blocks being rejected by full nodes (like Coinbase's and Binance's) if their 51% majority turns out not to be as solid as they thought it was. As far as I know this has never happened; the only transactions I've seen excluded from the blockchain are unanimous things like the spam transactions you're talking about.
- jondwillis 4y ago
  Yeah, Bitcoin doesn’t typically make sense for avoidance purposes while you are still interfacing with centralized entities. It was always supposed to be p2p but has largely failed at that because there’s no real need for most people’s use case (speculation.)
- redox99 4y ago
  > Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant. How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous. And before you say "yeah but nobody does that", I do that and a lot of people in my country do that. > Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable. I don't see the point here? If it's no longer bitcoin then of course it's properties don't apply anymore. By the way I don't consider Bitcoin specifically a good replacement because it's not scalable, but my point applies to other potentially similar but scalable cryptocurrencies (maybe ETH in the future if they figure out scalability)
  - etchalon 4y ago
    > If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous. It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used. This is fairly rudimentary forensics work, and an unmaskable, centralized store of all transactions makes it trivial. > I don't see the point here? "Anti-censorship" properties that are worthless in real-world usage seem to be a fairly important flaw if we're talking about a technologies anti-censorship properties.
    - redox99 4y ago
      > It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used. How is that? Let's say I go to PornHub and purchase premium (which is only purchasable with crypto). Assume tor usage to not have to worry about any kind of side channel identity leak. How could PornHub know who I am? At most, if the person who sold me the crypto face to face messed up and the address he used to send me the coins becomes identified, PornHub could assume A) This is another address of his or B) This is the address of someone he conducted business with Either way you would need to personally inquire him to leak my identity, in case he even knows it. And this is assuming a trivial case without the use of mixers and so on. Ideally you would want your wallet software to automatically handle all this stuff, and automatically clean your coins for you, generate new addresses, etc without you even knowing.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Crypto now means Coinbase the same way that email now means Gmail. But it doesn't have to be that way. Protocols > Platforms.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Nobody here in Argentina uses Coinbase; they all use Binance.
    - llanowarelves 4y ago
      Interesting. Yeah it's a few different exchanges + banks. The dependency on platforms is the problem here.
      - kragen 4y ago
        I agree that it's a problem, but an oligopoly like that is much less of a problem than a Gmail-style near-monopoly would be.
wolongong942 4y ago
In reality it isn't pseudonymous though, because 99% of users are on centralized KYC exchanges for convenience.
- kragen 4y ago
  Maybe 99% of the users you know. When LocalBitcoins imposed KYC everyone in Argentina switched to Binance.