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Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

> Bitcoin payments are anonymous, but they are perfectly traceable. Quite the important distinction there.

And I was merely saying Bitcoin has been making untraceable digital payments possible (and practical/easy).

Nowhere was I saying it is impossible to also use Bitcoin for traceable digital payments.

And you'd still be wrong. There's nothing about bitcoin that makes payments untraceable (quite the opposite).

It takes longer, but it's possible.

"It takes longer, but it's possible"?

That's like saying decrypting RSA "takes longer, but it's possible". Yeah, good luck.

There used to be ransomware that demanded cash by mail. RSA analogy? Way too harsh.

That's good to know, I wasn't aware. But cash by mail... at what scale? How many people were attacked?

And I don't see why the RSA analogy is "too harsh". Impractical is impractical.

But tracing bitcoin is not impractical. It's been done.

Floppy disk days, no big thing. But practical enough to work in the wild. RSA bruteforce is (I hope) impractical on a different level.

It's more like saying "breaking sha1 is slower than md5".

Like, it's more awkward but quite doable especially with decent resources.

Isn't the ledger public ? Isn't it easier to track for the authorities than cash serial numbers ?

It's easier in many ways but due to anonymity you have to cross trace more.

But yes, it's WAY easier to trace than cash