I have a crazy idea that might just work. What if we could create something that has the privacy of cash, is uncensorable like cash but could also be digitally transmitted like electronic payments?
Bitcoin, not crypto. And poster has to be cryptic and/or sarcastic because even though it's a solution to this very problem staring us in the face, people here shut down any intelligent conversation about it both with down votes and tired, long winded, oft repeated, uninformed arguments against it. It's pretty discouraging, honestly
Bitcoin absolutely does not have the privacy of cash!
It is cash like in that if you typo the destination address you instantly lose all the money, which is sort of like how you can accidentally set cash on fire.
You shouldn't have intelligent conversations with crypto people any more than any other kind of scammer. They're going to pickpocket you while you do it.
All Bitcoins are trackable on the blockchain, and these days you won't go far before transactions can be connected to an identifiable wallet.
If you've ever said anything like "Donations accepted at $ADDRESS", then everyone can see if anyone ever sent anything, and from there it doesn't take much work to see if you ever spent that money on anything and what else you do with it.
You can obscure things some, but the records are permanent and anything people can figure out stays known. If the authorities are after you, then they can get information from exchanges, which at this point require giving them personal information.
Cash is much more private. It takes much more effort to figure out who you gave your cash to.
This is also transitive: if I get bitcoin from you and two weeks from now the cops show up at my door asking to know why I had a funds related to some crime, I have to convince them that I had no knowledge of the transaction a couple of steps back and even if I do I might find that vendors stop accepting anything in that chain or start buying insurance to protect them. That’s going to sour people on the experience real quickly.
Variations of that show up everywhere: your employer can review your political donations or decide you spend too much money at the local bar, casino, or anywhere else they don’t approve of.
People do track cash by serial number, each and every bill has a unique one. However in practice it doesn't happen a lot. I would think that's because:
- There are a whole lot of bills to keep track of
- The serial numbers are not easily stored and compared with computers (at least not for private individuals)
That second point, bills not being on computers, is why cash isn't the easy answer to the banking problems we are discussing here. You can't pay someone across the country very easily using dollar bills.
With Bitcoin, there actually aren't any bills or tokens with serial numbers attached to them. There are however, as you point out, unique addresses for each transaction. Like the vast number of paper bill serial numbers, there are a lot of possibly Bitcoin addresses. Far, far more than there are paper dollar bills, sands in the sea, and stars in the sky, actually.
It is, however, somewhat possible to track Bitcoin going too and from the addresses because it is all on computers and this is a trade off of Bitcoin being permission-less and not controlled by a single entity that can decide to unbank you, and online so that you can send it to people across the country.
So, as you point out, if someone publicly associates themselves with a Bitcoin address, and if they reuse that address over and over, you can see how much Bitcoin is going into and out of that address, and if the other addresses in these transactions are also known, then you can easily see that Bob sent Alice some Bitcoin. Address reuse and publicly associating yourself with an address was unfortunately common in the early days of Bitcoin, but practically it never never happens anymore. Instead each and every transaction uses a new unique address, and as I said before, there a vast huge number of possible addresses.
As for exchanges, yes, they do have identities associated with Bitcoin addresses. You can easily accept bitcoin from an exchange and then transfer it again to other addresses that have not been publicly associated with you.
Also, hopefully someday exchanges won't be necessary.
True. But now hand someone that lives in a different state or country some cash. Oh wait, you can't easily do that. There are trade-offs in everything.
I guess it depends what you mean by "number 1" but we are claiming that it is the number one best ;)
In all seriousness, it's not just a talking point. Bitcoin's invention, promises, implementation, and operation has significant fundamental differences from all the others. If all you can be bothered to do is say, "yep, they all look the same to me," then maybe just sit out this conversation?
Sorry for the confusion. The term Bitcoin can be used to refer to the code that runs the Bitcoin network upon which the Bitcoin currency/token moves around and is stored. The inventors could probably have come up with different names for each of those things, but what can you do?
Cryptocurrency folks do sometimes take the open source Bitcoin code and make small (or large) changes to it in order to do their work. When they do this they create a separate codebase, separate network, and a separate currency. Almost inevitably they do so in such a way as to greatly benefit themselves and to fool you.
Yeah, I've messed with the stuff a bit in the past. I understand the technical details decently well.
I don't see any significant difference between Bitcoin and the rest. Bitcoin was just the first thing that stuck but that doesn't grant it any special privileges.
If you can't figure out why Bitcoin stuck and the others didn't then maybe you should put a little more effort into understanding the differences. Or just respectfully stay out of these conversations maybe?
Unless you're implying Monero I don't think so.
> is uncensorable like cash
Uncensorable until you get sanctioned like Tornado Cash? Or this is also about Monero?
> but could also be digitally transmitted like electronic payments?
At the same speed, convenience, security and efficiency level?