3 ms·
Gold?
by jkot 12y ago
Gold?
- at-fates-hands 12y agoThis was my thought. Considering BTC isn't exactly "untraceable", Gold makes far more sense in terms of an untraceable commodity with far less fluctuations than BTC. It already has value, is widely held by people, and can be easily converted to virtually any kind of currency much easier and without less tracks than BTC.
- knodi123 12y agothere are robust techniques for tagging gold with trackable isotopes, so it's really only fungible if you can avoid drawing the attention of anyone with the necessary resources to track it. But I guess that's not much of a point, since the same is true of literally anything.
- logfromblammo 12y agoAs a commodity good with a physical presence, gold is traceable in the sense that it leaves evidence of its passage. The boat that carries it has a deeper draft, and burns slightly more fuel as a result, for instance. Even the "Die Hard 2" method works; it isn't necessary to follow the gold if you can find the dump trucks. Obviously, there is an upper limit to the amount of gold you can move without anyone noticing it. Bits traversing networks are more traceable, but they are less identifiable. An encrypted packet passing through my home router could be a fraction of a family photo, or it could be a transfer of $1M worth of dark currency. You don't know unless you can decrypt it.
- huffer 12y agoFrom a different perspective, any physical currency has the disadvantage of exposing its owner/handler to the same old problems: (s)he can be physically (often violently) separated from it, any transaction needs physical encounter between the two parties (which hinders both anonymity and trading at a distance), along with minor problems such as secure storage, forging, authorities controlling it, etc. That's one of the often overlooked reasons why a cryptocurrency is so radically different (and such a good fit for the XXIst century).