Your claims about tracking bitcoin don't hold water.
Bitcoin currently has about the same amount of anonymity as cash. Just like cash can be tracked by serial numbers, bitcoin can be tied to accounts that nobody knows who owns them.
Prove me wrong by telling me the name of the person who made this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/aa394e99f4406cbd23b91dba331cd8c57f1ac572447791ad46f0361b20998c92
Its not me who tracks you. You have to read what I have wrote. There are companies which does that job. Bitcoin is not anonym, its pseudonym.
You have to read what I wrote. Bitcoin is pseudonymous.
The fact of the matter is that you can't back up your claim that companies are able to identify who made that transaction. They can ocassionally tie a transaction to a person, but as soon as the money moves, they don't know it it's still that person's money.
At this point we're just talking past each other, so I guess I'll just end with: have a nice day. 👋
We see exactly how the reality is. They block tainted coins, they tie UTXO to persons etc. There are already cases at the court.
The fact of the matter is that chainanal is mapping he entir utxo set. Probably more than 90% of new users come in through KYCed gateways or ETFs and the anonset of people who have*avoided* KYC is only going to get worse.
Because when there is NO GOOD WAY to add entropy back into the system, it trends towards maximum surveillance.
You can argue that is good enough for now,
but Bitcoin privacy is in a pretty sad fucking state and its only looking to get worse in the short term.
Most of the network is already under surveillance and they *certainly* be sure when you do self transfers etc.
Beyond that you're just trusting the legal system to do the right thing.
LOL
"tell me the name of this person" never fails
then visa/mastercard transactions have more anonymity than bitcoin AND cash!! otherwise prove me wrong by telling me what was the last visa/mastercard transaction to happen, the amount, and the names involved?!?!
Straw man argument. Nobody has claimed visa/mc is private. Try steel manning instead.
Your claim that bitcoin is as anonymous as cash just because we don't know the full name and home address of a random bitcoin tx implies that visa and mastercard transactions are even MORE anonymous than bitcoin and cash, as there isn't even a public explorer for us to observe transactions taking place and see each other's balances
Your bad faith arguments aren't winning anyone over.
It's simple. Bitcoin has privacy. Just accept that simple fact.
Monero has better privacy, and I hope Bitcoin gets some protocol level updates to try to get closer to where monero is.
Try having an honest conversation with people. Trying to belittle people isn't going to be very effective. Besides, you can avoid looking childish if you talk to people like an adult.
I just jumped in because you said bitcoin has the same anonymity as cash and that's clearly stupid. Nothing beats cash because it's offline, payments never registered or recorded (unless under security cameras), even with serial numbers it can move hands with zero traces.
Bitcoin has privacy is OK to say, and Monero has better privacy, even better. Now we're serious
If even Monero can be traced by chainalysis in some rare cases, like the E-A-E attack, to catch criminals, the main argument that bitcoin is closely watched does hold water and it requires way more effort to "wash" bitcoins under surveillance, but it's obvious that picking a random tx on-chain is not a good example of bitcoin privacy since we're not the ones those participants should be worried about
You can only truly hide the traces if doing large size coinjoins, and in very long time intervals so that your entry bitcoins are about weeks or months apart from when you want to spend them with a bunch of mixes in between
I would agree with most of that before the lightning network existed. Now Bitcoin really is like cash. Both are imperfect and both offer a significant degree of privacy.
If you want more details, I'd suggest the privacy chapter of the book "Resistance Money". It lays it out in great detail, with citations and it includes fun tidbits like that those automated checkouts at stores scan the serial numbers of bills.
> prove me wrong by fighting this straw man I created
> bitcoin has the same anonymity as cash
Prove yourself right by showing me the publicly available transaction history of every dollar bill in existence.
You can't track cash as it changes hands. You can track which bank ATM it left and which one it wound up in, that's about it. Cash can't be tracked from one hand to another using serial numbers.
Doesn't the last paragraph describe lightning? A point of entry & exit, can't track what happens in between?
Oh I didn't think about this... A bank can't force you to "deposit at an ATM". A counterparty can force close your channel. So even lightning is jot as good as cash.
Also cash has no payment processors. Lightning doesn't have to have them, but in practicality almost always does, in the form of large liquidity providers offering channels as a service.
