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by woodruffw
1589 days ago
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> In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys. Sure. Now show me a human economy that's a closed system! We meat-sacks love our groceries, movie tickets, &c. > If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address. As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money. Bitcoin cannot solve the Big Man With A Stick problem, and ignoring the problem makes it strictly worse than fiat. > But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas. "Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-) |
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Yes, you're not required to identify yourself when you purchase those things. So a transaction between two parties for the exchange of goods would be private. I can send money to my mom and you'll never know.
> As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money.
No one can stop an address from receiving from another address. You can implement tracing and enforcement to make it difficult for a particular transaction within a particular jurisdiction, but this is a function of social implementation, not the network. And if you want even more anonymity, look into Monero.
> "Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-)
Not sure what you mean by that. I think the proliferation of competing ideas and forks is a good thing. Most projects are bad, but over time only the strong will survive.