Topic: Don't these efforts to anonymize bitcoin sort of miss the point? (Read 520 times)

The thing about having an anonymous currency like Bitcoin is that it prevents centralised systems and companies from data farming with impunity like the have, just now I've been digging around and it looks like many companies are taking my personal information from my debit card and either doing a terrible job of keeping it private or just outright abusing trust and not bothering to do anything to prevent the information getting out there. If you like having your personal life open for everyone to see and have personal information stolen then feel free to stick to fiat

As for Bitcoin becoming mainstream cryptographic currencies are very early technology at least in the decentralised form we see now. I do think though it will work a lot like Bittorrent in many respects so you can expect people to peel off, do their own thing and find what they like later on after people get to grips with the code.

It's open source, so I can never understand the people who attack Bitcoin and claim negatives when they could just go out and create their own version if they think it's better.

Isn't it pretty clear that the block chain, or a decentralized model in general, cant be the final product here? I mean there is no way that is ever going to scale to facilitate global mainstream adoption. It seems to me that we are going to be forced to move to doing most of our transactions off chain whether we like it or not.

Now that is hardly a strike against bitcoin. Bicoins decentralized model is revolutionary in its never before seen quality of censorship resistance, but it is precisely this that we should be focusing our efforts towards levering, not anonymity. Bitcoin has the ability to act as a decentralized backbone upon which centralized ledgers can be built and in so doing and by levering the censorship resistant properties of bitcoin, creating a new censorship resistant centralized ledger system.

So then the real question is not whether we can make the decentralized ledger anonymous, but whether the entrepreneurs who provide centralized ledgers will be able to make those anonymous, and whether they will be able to prove that fact to us.

Anyway i would be interested to hear you guys thoughts. Is it possible for operators of centralized ledgers to make transactions anonymous? Is it possible to create technology that could prove to the customers that these ledgers are anonymous? do these technologies exist? if not is anyone working on them? if so who?

p.s. i wish there was a better place for this than off-topic but it doesnt seem to fit anywhere.