[krupan]

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

[astrange]

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.

[RockRobotRock]

you kinda just proved his point about shutting down intelligent conversation

[krupan]

Did I? I think I'm actually having some intelligent conversation now following that. Yay!

[astrange]

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.

[krupan]

Serious question, what the are the privacy properties of cash that Bitcoin lacks?

Who types destination addresses by hand? Probably the same people that expose a hoard of paper money to flames?

[dale_glass]

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.

[acdha]

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.

[krupan]

It isn't hard to accept money on an address that is known to be associated with you and then transfer it to an address that is not known (cannot be proven) to be associated with you. An extreme form of this is called coin mixing or coin joining, but for most of us, I would think, that level of address obfuscation will not ever be necessary. Or if it is then you can imagine it will be automated.

[acdha]

Think about what that means: people are expected to maintain multiple accounts, pay people to launder money between accounts, and never make a mistake, or fail to predict what financial activity today will become a problem later (did you donate to Planned Parenthood when Roe was the law of the land? Better figure out how to remove that from the blockchain before your employer transfers your job out of a free state. Oh, wait, it’s not possible - better just hope nobody ever thinks to look!).

Major criminals get caught making mistakes on that kind of thing, there’s no way normal people aren’t going to make mistakes – and that’s before you think about what using a mixer actually means: lighting a neon sign saying “something about this transaction is dodgy, examine it!”

[krupan]

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.

[astrange]

> 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.

It's not "somewhat" possible, it's 100% possible because the history is public and permanent. If you make a mistake once in your entire life Chainalysis will see through anything you previously did to obscure a transaction.

[krupan]

There is no personally identifiable information stored in the public ledger. Just addresses, scripts, and Bitcoin amounts. If someone that knows you (like an employer or a Bitcoin exchange) sends you Bitcoin, they will know addresses that you claimed were yours. As soon as the Bitcoin moves from those addresses to another address then the provable link to you is broken.

All the chain analysis you have heard of is based on likely patterns and typical behavior of address use in common Bitcoin wallet software. New signature and script schemes have been added to Bitcoin in the past several years that disrupt those patterns and make it even harder to find connections between addresses.

Further reading:

https://river.com/learn/bitcoin-privacy-and-anonymity/

https://river.com/learn/what-is-taproot/

[kube-system]

Handing someone cash does not create a public ledger entry

[krupan]

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.

[kube-system]

I can't easily give people bitcoin in my own country, because almost nobody I transact with accepts it.

[krupan]

Yes, we are in the early stages of Bitcoin and not a lot of people are using it. But we are talking about the properties it has inherently and by design. It is designed to be permissionless, everyone is allowed and able to use it. The current situation with regards to use/adoption are not the end game

[dale_glass]

Bitcoin is crypto. There's even a whole lot of cryptocurrencies based on Bitcoin with a variable or two changed somewhere.

[djaro]

But the problem is, Crypto is full of scams, so to avoid that negative connotation the latest Bitcoin talking point has become "Bitcoin isn't crypto".

Which is stupid, because Bitcoin is THE number 1 crypto, but for some reason they're all claiming it isn't.

[krupan]

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?

[krupan]

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.

[dale_glass]

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.

[krupan]

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?

[dale_glass]

> 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.

Yeah, inertia, social pressure, and economic incentives. For instance miners are into it for the money, so to them technology doesn't matter. A technologically superior network is of no use to a miner if mining for it makes less money.

> Or just respectfully stay out of these conversations maybe?

Nope.