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by schuetze 3223 days ago
IMHO anonymity has never been Bitcoin's strength, and we must stop pretending that BTC is the right tool for transactions that need to be private. At best, Bitcoin is pseudonymous.

Other currencies have attempted to fix this problem, such as Zcash. But I think it will be hard to escape the volumes of metadata created through transactions on merchant websites. Ultimately, your spending habits and browser cookies will say more about you than your BTC address.

1 comments

Sure, but it's quite nice that any random passerby who happens to look at the Monero blockchain has no idea what you've spent and where. If there's something like bitcoin's "new address per transaction" for Monero, they won't be able to tell anything even if they have data from all the merchants.
Monero should be treated like the beta software it is. There have been vulnerabilities in the past to remove anonymity and there will be in the future. I would at least give it 5 years & a lot more adoption to start trusting it somewhat.
The only Monero software in beta is the GUI which no one has reported any major issues with, and the CLI is just fine.

There hasn't been any vulnerabilities in the code affecting anonymity. Saying there will be vulnerabilities in the future is FUD.

Trust is a personal preference, but the code is open to all to analyze.

This is an incredibly naïve point of view.

> Saying there will be vulnerabilities in the future is FUD.

Saying there will be vulnerabilities is 99.99% likely to be true. All software written by humans is highly likely to have mistakes. Remember Heartbleed? The code was open for all to analyze and used by millions, and yet we recently found a vuln that allowed attackers to dump the entire memory of a server. Open source is no guarantee against vulnerabilities.

Default assumption should airways be that there will be vulnerabilities.