Topic: Is anonymity a good thing for Bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 402 times)

I think the people who are concerned about the anonymity of crypto due to the uses are over-worried about the small percentage of the population. You are going to have people use and abuse systems, no matter the system. In other words, you are going to have people stealing money in any way possible. Now, if people would do their research before blindly sending money to a team of anonymous users leading an ICO, then that's their own fault and not the fault of the cryptocurrency system itself. Yeah, there are people who are going to buy drugs and weapons with crpyto. But, they're going to do it with cash too. How do you plan to stop people from using 100s of millions of dollars in cash? You can't and won't.

You could deal with only registered companies but this also presents certain problems. For example a lot of companies that are registered require identification when dealing in large amounts. Most exchanges these days require identification. The problem with this is that if the site is hacked then your ID could very well be compromised. These sort of hacks haven't been rare either and major exchanges have either been forced to shut down or put their hands up and just say they've lost the money and can't refund anyone.

Luckily the hackers of the past have only been interested in the coin and not the personal information that's also stored on these big exchanges.

I like the way you are thinking about this rather than just agreeing with everyone else on the matter of anonymity. Personally though I would probably disagree with your point that some things just need to be public and others private. I value coins which have as much privacy as possible.

Yes it does have it's draw backs but there's ways of countering this. Only deal with registered businesses which the identity of the person is known. In many countries it is now law to register any businesses whether that is a Bitcoin businesses or one trading in other currencies.

Developers can't do everything for it's users and requires diligence from it's users and them making their own decisions.

It might be a more popular opinion than your leading on here. It's not limited to privacy advocates but at the end of the day Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are normally used because they are transparent in that they are traceable via the blockchain but don't give away any personal data which I think is something which should be encouraged in all fields.

I think that one way to approach this issue might be a public, volunteer-based registry that matches public Bitcoin addresses to identities. 100% optional, of course.  You or your business would self-identify one or more public bitcoin addresses and provide some information about who you are. This would serve as a record of companies and individuals who were transparent and perhaps might be considered more trustworthy to do business with under certain narrow conditions.

Of course, it's not for everyone, and there are clearly some privacy issues , precisely because of the transparency of the blockchain. However, I see that in some narrow use cases it would make sense.  If your company did a specific portion of business using crypto-currency, and you were unfazed by a public record of your transactions, and in fact some aspect of your business needed to be 100% transparent between both parties, then I could see this being used.  And, of course, if a blockchain itself was used to hold the registry data, then the record would be more or less permanent. 

Just a thought - I'm sure there are plenty of privacy advocates would be horrified - but remember, I'm talking about a very narrow, completely transparent use case.

I think this is approaching the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin a little bit differently from what we see everywhere else. A lot of the praise of Bitcoin is the anonymity. Why is this? Yes it's true that Bitcoin can be used anonymously and not have any identity or name associated with the Bitcoin address however all transactions are readily available to be seen by everyone using Bitcoin because of the public ledger technology the Blockchain. Anonymity at a first look is by all accounts an incredible choice for individuals who might want to send and get cash on the web. Despite the fact that I think this is one of the ruins of Bitcoin. It's this exact same anonymity which is normally commended by the mass causes a ton of issues with Bitcoin and organizations trading in Bitcoin.

If you ask someone about Bitcoin and what they have heard about it then they will surely bring up one hack or one instance of an anonymous businesses owner upping ship and leaving with all of it's customers money. This isn't usually possible with businesses using fiat because of how traceable credit cards and the like are in the modern world. (unless  they are stolen which is an entirely different matter)

If you think of the way that you shop online with your USD/GBP etc then you almost certainly use either a credit card, debit card or Paypal. All of which have to have a Name, address and identity tied to it with Bitcoin this is different the only ties that a Bitcoin address has is the ones that it creates by sending and storing Bitcoin.

This opens up a gateway for malicious intent. As we all know Bitcoin has suffered from exactly this over the years. Businesses starting to trade in Bitcoin that are not normally tied to an identity and aren't registered and just leave with the customers money eventually without a trace. Quite a few exchanges and cloud mining services have done this recently. You would think that this would be easily traceable by watching the addresses which have the runaway Bitcoin in them and waiting until they use either a known address or an exchange address especially the latter as you could potentially ask the exchange to release information of the seller to the public (probably requiring a subpoena) but in most cases these people will mix their coins and making it almost impossible to find out who actually owns the addresses.

This will continue to be a problem as long as anonymity exists in the Bitcoin network. Let me also say that I'm not interested in removing the anonymity as I'm a big fan of privacy and how Bitcoin works. But possibly there's a few solutions that could prevent this event in the future.

I'm not a big fan of Bill Gates but he recently said this:

I'm not a fan of what he's implying here. But he probably has some point hidden within this statement. Let's not get into the debate that cash can also be used for much of the above. What I think he does have a point in is that some anonymity is likely bad and perhaps some aspects should not be anonymous while keeping some anonymous. I'm not really concerned too much about what he said about tax evasion etc as that's rife in fiat currencies too but more concerned about the people who use Bitcoin to trade. They probably haven't got the same protection that someone using another currency might have and these owners of companies that just up and leave are a big issue with the security and practicality of using Bitcoin on a daily basis.