bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Wed Nov 27 03:01:58 PST 2013


On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:52:33PM +0200, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
> On 2013-11-27, Guido Witmond wrote:
> 
> >Bitcoin cannot stop corruption but it may make it harder to hide.
> 
> How, precisely, compared to what we have now?

Transactions are in a global ledger. You might not be able
to link warm bodies to a specific account directly, but 
indirectly (especially, if they engage in transactions,
or want to convert their currency). This is more difficult 
with banknotes, even if you have the serial numbers on record. 
Banknotes do not globally broadcast their current location.
 
> >My hope is that Bitcoin is transparent enough for action groups to
> >investigate and bring the dirty laundry into the sunlight.
> 
> My and most cryptoanarchist's hope, I believe, is the precise
> opposite. At least I think BitCoin is woefully inadequate in the
> anonymity department, and should be made better so that no action

This is the tradeoff of having a practical system. I personally
think that anonymous cash is orthogonal to the digital cash issue.
It can be done in a different system, or use an anonymization layer
like Tor, I2P or cjdns operates on top of TCP/IP.

> group, government, anybody at all, can trace godfuck about what
> happened with it. Most certainly that "dirt" is just the killer app
> for any and all crypto currency. Not a bug, but the primary feature
> of the arrangement.



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