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Good points! Yes, public blockchains are often not suitable for private or confidential transactions. That being said, anonymization tools do exist, which can

Good points! Yes, public blockchains are often not suitable for private or confidential transactions. That being said, anonymization tools do exist, which can solve this problem for many use cases. Also, I agree that blockchains only work in the context of a functioning legal system, in that the link between on-chain assets and physical assets must be enforced via some legal or governmental mechanism. This should be possible using contracts under current law, however, and such contracts could be limited to establishing this linkage, avoiding more complex issues that might otherwise come into play if it were not for the use of a blockchain for record-keeping, transfers and settlement.

pr0zac 4y ago
It’s actually an interesting question if or how anonymization tooling/coins would work in a business context. You want to shield your transactions some of the time to prevent competitive analysis of your business expenses etc but other times require provable transaction reporting and tracking for stuff like tax purposes and financial disputes. You want to be able to prove you sent a payment or need to document yearly expenditures for instance, being anonymous in those situations could cause issues. You could use signatures to prove ownership of the keys involved in a transaction I suppose but I’m not familiar enough with the laws in this context to know if it’s sufficient legally nor am I an accountant. I guess stuff like that is kind of a gray area and is an example of the unclear guidance that pro-regulation crypto folks in the US have been asking for the government to provide clarity on.