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Comment by ghostbrainalpha | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble understanding this...

Could you help me think of an example where this type of privacy is useful, for non criminal reasons?

Imagine a world where the street taco vendor that accepted your money gets you bank transaction history since you opened the account. That's bitcoin. Privacy is important because wallet anonymity is really the only privacy you have, and once it's gone there's no getting it back, and it's retroactive. Mixing services add a buffer.

This is a great point not understood by many. Bitcoin keeps a history of all transactions. If you identify yourself during a transaction your history is exposed. Mixing services help.

Except that's mitigated with a HD wallet, unless you're reusing addresses.

Thank you. That is exactly the type of response I was hoping for.

A really good article on privacy in general that needs to be read by everyone:

https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.htm...

But regarding cryptocurrencies specifically:

Imagine an organization in one of the 74 countries where simply being homosexual is still illegal (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/gay-lesbian-bisexual...) that tries to save them from being prosecuted by the government.

This may require some anonymous cash.

Not all laws are equally just across time and space. The right to meet in secret and conduct transactions in secret aids transitions.

It's ironic that your argument against associating privacy with criminality is citing an example where privacy is seen as morally necessary specifically because the acts one wishes to support have been criminalized.

It seems to me your problem is more with the association between criminality and moral wrongdoing than that between privacy and criminality.

Who is going to be the perfectly moral individual or organization who will be able to fairly distinguish between that which is moral but illegal and that which is immoral and illegal? The answer of course is that no such entity exists nor will exist. And you cannot stop the latter entirely without also halting the former, and halting the former is arguably worse (but that's debatable, especially if your opening argument is "Let's take mass child slave trafficking.")

Non-private transactions leak your entire transaction graph to the world. There are a plethora of reasons, many of them rooted in avoiding becoming a victim of crime, one would prefer their transactions be private.

Or you could just use a traditional payment method that doesn't, by default, leak your entire transaction graph to the world.

Traditional payment methods can't do certain things, like send money to someone in another country for a fee of $0.05 in a matter of a minute, or make a payment on a website without disclosing to them your personal details.

You may also not feel comfortable with your bank or government knowing all of your private financial interactions. There is no reason to blindly trust your bank or government to that extent.

Paypal can do both of those

Paypal can also close your account at the drop of a hat, and has a very nice long list of things you can't do with your money when it's connected to paypal (a list of things which will get your account close and your money confiscated in some areas).

You can also throw stupendous quantities of cryptocurrency in the bin accidentally. So there's that.

Trade offs I guess.

PayPal doesn't work globally.

Neither does Bitcoin

In which country do cryptocurrencies not work in? They work in every country in the world. They are used a lot in Venezuela for example.

According to this[1] around half the people on Earth don't have internet access.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access

Bitcoin hasn't been fast or cheap for a very long time, whereas many 'traditional payment methods' let people send money instantly for free.

> whereas many 'traditional payment methods' let people send money instantly for free.

Well, not really free. There's a cost associated, but it may not be initially applied to the consumer. It makes it's way through in some way though, such as an increased service cost. The most transparent industry for this is likely gas stations, which in the U.S. at least (and even then I can only comment on the regions I've observed it), they will quote different prices per gallon for cash and for credit/debit, which is them pushing the cost through to the consumer transparently. This was actually disallowed by card processing agreements in the past, because card processors didn't want the fees hampering acceptance of charge cards.

Some people need to use bitcoin to avoid capital controls, prohibitively high transaction costs or other obstacles. Just because you don't think it's useful doesn't mean no one does.

Businesses don't want their books to be public. Could even be an SEC violation if they leaked certain info through the blockchain. Some kind of greater anonymity will be required for business adoption, but that could mean something off-chain other than a mixer.

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