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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

I'm weirdly ambivalent about Bitcoin privacy/anonymity. On the one hand I deeply value my privacy, and would personally love it if Bitcoin were fully anonymous.

Yet - I also deeply felt intuitively that the Panama Papers exposed bad behavior. The bad behavior it exposed were people aiming to archive financial privacy.

I can't really reconcile the two beliefs.

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There is currently an actively developed alternative cryptocurrency called Monero, that uses the 'Cryptonote Protocol', and has a completely different codebase from Bitcoin.

It uses Ring Signatures and a few other cryptographic tricks to make the currency provably unlinkable and untraceable. In 6 months, the network will hard fork to support what is being called "RingCT", which will hide the amount sent in a transaction, in addition to the sender and the receiver that are hidden at the moment.

If you want to read some more about it, ask all the questions you like on /r/monero, they'll be happy to get as technical as you want.

Yes. Fully anonymous digital currency and and widespread, legal usage is hard to imagine together. There's simply no way governments would allow that, so regulations of digital currencies is only a matter of time. Yes, I know that argument that "physical money is anonymous too", but that's not the same, physical money has physical constraint and you can't transfer huge amount of them around the world in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, a crackdown on real money has already started(1, 2 etc)..

1. http://www.euronews.com/2015/12/16/cash-losing-its-currency-...

2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/08/german-plan-pro...

I think Monero fits in nicely in such a scenario with its view key. They call it private, but optionally transparent. The regulators can ask to "view" a transaction.

It's easy to reconcile your beliefs: "Privacy is good when it's for me, and bad when it's for other people".

Privacy and anonymity in all forms can both benefit and be abused, which is why there's usually some sort of balance. Bitcoin doesn't attempt to find any balance, which is too bad.

It doesn't currently approach that balance, but there are plenty of initiatives that are in the concept stage that would go a long way.

Weren't they seeking to achieve tax evasion, not privacy?

Physical currencies are anonymous, and they are not widely seen as unethical.

Yes, physical currencies are anonymous. However, it doesn't seem very practical to hold onto the physical currency in the amount that these guys are hiding.

Reminds me of a joke, the 500 euro note was created so politicians only have to carry one suitcase on a plane.

Difficult but not impossible, you can easily carry $100,000 in $100 notes in a bag, and at most you would only need to carry a thousand or so.

As far as legally stashing cash, a large safe or gold would suffice.

Perhaps we need a system which exposes people only if they own more than a certain percentage of total capital.

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