On Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 2:07 PM David Barrett <[1]dbarrett@expensify.com>
   wrote:

   I am very confused why anyone thinks Bitcoin is untraceable, anonymous,
   or anything less than a privacy disaster.  It is literally the least
   private currency ever devised: once I know your wallet, I know truly
   everything you have ever done back to the very start.  Bitcoin is as
   private as sharing all your credit card purchases via twitter: yes,
   very noisy, but totally in the open (and "mixing" things between
   wallets is just silly -- computers can unwind all that in a
   millisecond).
   If you have a mapping of "human identity to wallet" (which the
   government nearly always has because virtually every path to convert
   BTC to USD/EUR/etc is regulated), then no matter how many intermediate
   steps and secret wallets are used as some kind of

   Wallets are often associated with many identities, e.g. in exchanges.
   So it's not quite that easy, it's comparable to ip addresses.  C Wiley
   claimed Cambridge Analytica made a complete ip-address-to-name
   database.

   "factoring" approach toward money laundering, you can always figure out
   who is being paid by whom.  In fact, it's *easier* for the FBI to
   unwind your laundering via BTC than normal banks, because normal banks
   *have shitloads of privacy protections and subpoena requirements that
   BTC doesn't*.
   The only way it's private is if you skip every exchange, but that's the
   classic tradeoff of privacy for convenience -- yes, there are lots of
   ways to maintain your privacy inconveniently, and BTC is just one
   more.  And if the only way to truly do anonymous transfers is by
   meeting up in person to exchange cash for a keydrive containing a
   wallet private key, then BTC is really no better on the
   privacy/convenience spectrum than just handing someone a suitcase of
   gold.

   Your behavior data is still stored permanently on the blockchain.
   Deanonymising you just takes dev effort.

   Blockchain is great and all, but in none of the ways people investing
   in it claim.
   -david

   It seems like the belief that bitcoin is anonymous stems from the
   difficulty of people understanding it when it was new.
   How much technology should different people worry about other people
   having?
   Effective mediation in conflicts would solve such things.

References

   1. mailto:dbarrett@expensify.com