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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big believer in privacy, but anonymity scares me. Anonymity invites bad behavior: look at how bitcoin -- which isn't even all that anonymous -- has enabled the ransomware industry.

I agree that it is very important for people to be able to conduct financial transactions without having to disclose them to third parties. It's also important for people to be able to use a mutually-agreed-upon trusted third party to mediate transactions where neither party knows the other's identity. But I'm much less convinced of the wisdom of enabling people to conduct financial transactions with no possibility of knowing who they are doing business with. That seems to me to be fraught with all manner of moral hazard.

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I would argue that anonymity and privacy are equally positive things and both necessary for a functional society.

Anonymity facilitates the exposing of bad actors and systemic failures in the bureaucracies we've created to help and protect each other, i.e., whistle blowers.

I would also argue think ransomware is a good thing. Although it's annoying, it's providing just enough of a shift in incentives for people to start taking data security seriously. Ransomware makes everyones data more secure in the long run.

> Anonymity facilitates the exposing of bad actors

No, it doesn't actually. What are called "anonymous sources" in the press are actually not anonymous in the sense that ZCash makes them anonymous: their identity is known to the journalist who publishes the story. The identity of the source is kept confidential by the journalist. This mechanism is an important check on the credibility of the source. True anonymity leads as much to vendetta-driven libel as it does to legitimate whistle-blowing. There's a reason that serious people get their information from the Register and the Washington Post instead of 4chan.

Also, anonymity in general and an anonymous currency are not the same thing.

we have fully anonymous, working cryptocurrencies now (monero is the best example). You cannot link transactions nor determine the balance of a public key. without the private key and transaction key no court can seize.

we have anonymous darknet markets, where you can buy many controlled substances, in visibility of law enforcement.

My point is that you can't uninvent these things. They have already changed society, and moralizing on how we shouldn't invent these things has gone way past into heavy production.

Use the technology, dont use it; this is really the only choice you can make. Their existence wont go away.

I'm not moralizing about inventing these things, I'm moralizing about using them. Inventing a nuclear weapon is not the same as using one.

BTW, I didn't know about Monero. Is there any substantive difference between it and ZCash?

Yes. Monero is fairly distributed, not 20% for insiders to dump.

By the same token, sending the message to launch is not the same as sending a confidential message.

Confidential != anonymous. Anonymous invites bad behavior more than confidential does.

How are those different? They have equivalent meaning.

"Confidential" means the content of a communication is (intended to be) secret. "Anonymous" means the identity of the author is secret. Big difference.

When I send a friend an encrypted Signal, it's confidential i.e. its contents are secret. My friend knows it's from me. I am not anonymous.

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