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Comment by jsjohns2 | Hacker News Reader

> For a while, Bitcoin was used for transactions that people wanted to keep secret from government authorities, like drug deals. It soon became apparent, however, that if authorities wanted to track these transactions, they could. For instance, Silk Road, the first major online drug market, which made use of Bitcoin, was shut down by the F.B.I. in 2013.

This is pretty weak reasoning from one of the "top 5% economists in the world". The Silk Road shutdown was (reportedly) the result of poor OPSEC on the part of Ulbricht and has nothing to do with the anonymity characteristics of Bitcoin.

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One of the top 5% economists? LOL Market efficiency is not about prices reflecting "intrinsic value". First lesson of economy is that there's no such a thing. An efficient market allocates resources according to people's preferences. What's the "intrinsic value" of collectible baseball cards? Yet they have a non-zero price in a mostly unregulated market. No economist before has ever bothered to write an article about why ridiculous collectibles disprove market efficiency... maybe because this doesn't make sense? Also, pretty much nobody believes in markets that are maximally efficient in every case. People just understand that markets not being perfect doesn't mean those trying to regulate it are automatically perfectly enlightened. The article conjures a bunch of fallacies in order to attack a straw man.

What are the anonymity characteristics of bitcoin?

Can't I simply traverse the blockchain (which is essentially a linked list) to see which address transacted with which?

You can ‘tumble’ bitcoins to obfuscate the true source and destination walets

The only thing that tumbling does is prevent a direct link between 2 possibly illicit transactions.

Unless the tumblers are use for mostly legitimate transactions they are useless and being linked to to one will raise a flag if you are under investigation.

But Tumbling isn't an inherent characteristic of Bitcoin and requires trusting a third party.

Yeah but the example the author used had nothing to do with Bitcoin.

And you could also argue that if you took precautions you could setup an anonymous wallet that isn't directly linked to you.

You need to cash out at some point which is effectively impossible to do these days without going through paper work.

Bitcoin that can never be converted to fiat or used in a transaction that cannot be anonymous such as land or property purchas is worthless.

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