The anonymity feature is doomed to fail and should be halted. It is costing too much and will be in vain.
The Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation has a different view from you:
User-controlled Privacy
Privacy is extremely hard to come by on the Internet. Bitcoin itself is not very private right now.
Publication of the owner of a single Bitcoin address can yield an incredible amount of personal financial information, information that cannot be put ‘back in the box’ – it will be available forever, encoded into the blockchain. This is the sort of information that law enforcement agencies would typically need to subpoena a bank for; instead right now we offer it to the entire Internet.
We haven’t yet seen significant involvement from consumer privacy agencies at the Foundation, but I believe they will be horrified when they understand just how much private financial data is being broadcast and permanently recorded.
This information directly impacts citizens living under repressive governments. It could cause physical harm to a woman whose finances are controlled by her pimp or her kidnapper. The knowledge of transactions can be combined with violence to limit any human’s fundamental right to transact economically.
It seems therefore critical that we do everything we can to support efforts that enhance this privacy from global inspection. Technological efforts like trustless sharing and ZeroCoin/ZeroCash have potential to improve the privacy guarantees available to those using Bitcoin.
Not everyone will want this kind of privacy to be available. In some jurisdictions, concerns over money laundering are brought up as the reason why such privacy should not be available.
I believe that these concerns are real and valid, and pragmatically, that a balance needs to be struck. We don’t yet know exactly how to balance the risks to different parties; on the one hand direct violence, control of individuals and financial risks borne by citizens with hyper-inflationary money supply are real harms being borne by human beings around the world right now. On the other hand there are real and more generalized harms to society that money laundering enables.
Right now, I believe the most reasonable regulatory approach is to encourage anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer rules that can be implemented at the ‘endpoints’, Bitcoin exchanges or money transmittal businesses. These businesses already have clear regulation and operations rules and understand how to identify money laundering, and what to do about it when they see it.
At the same time, we need to do better protecting those who have no other safe way to transact economically, and the Foundation will be providing support for a variety of proposals as a way to let the broader community engage with them and assess what would be useful.
Peter Vessenes, Chairman of the Board Apr 05 2014,
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=679
is there a podcast or something from the darkcoin bbc talk?
hahaha
