[supermatt]

You are anonymous until you are linked to your wallet.

Anyone who has transacted with you can do that, so then anything sent/received from that wallet address is linked to you.

You can get around this by having many wallets. If you don't reuse those wallets, then a counterparty cant directly identify your other transactions. That means you need to have your balance distributed among many wallets, in denominations small enough that they would be consumed in a single spend.

But - you need to get the funds into those wallets in the first place. You cant simply split up your wallet, as these wallets would be linked to each other via a common ancestor. Instead, you would need to receive from a 3rd party, but then they would be able to identify the transaction from that wallet as coming from you...

So to remain anonymous, you simply never transact with anyone other than yourself ;)

[johnyzee]

Is this FUD or just a lack of understanding? Staying anonymous is very easy. You can choose between a number of ways to move coins into a separate address in an untraceable way. E.g. (1) CoinJoin transactions (which are natively supported in the protocol), (2) through Lightning, which is also an official extension, usable in production right now, or (3) using a third-party mixing service. Those are just off the top of my head.

[supermatt]

Knowledge a few years out of date I guess. Still counterparty issues with mixers, somewhat with coinjoin too, but lightning seems pretty cool.

[ajkdhcb2]

Yes you can have privacy with bitcoin only if you never transact with it... lol