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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

> there is no lack of trusted enough intermediaries...

Equifax? Wells Fargo? Happy that your payment card provider sells your purchase history? Or that we spent trillions to bail out bankers mistakes?

What about trust in nonfinancial matters: Voting machines? Google? Facebook? The NSA? The 30 obscure random companies tracking any given web page?

Maybe we trust too readily.

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> Are you happy that your payment card provider is selling your purchase history?

Yes, I'd much prefer it to be freely available for all to see.

Except it's linked to one or many pseudonymous wallet addresses, so only linkable to your real name under certain circumstances and/or by TLAs. And that's before anonymizing protocols (available now as separate coins, coming soon-ish to ETH, and probably at some point to BTC)

Or its hidden by RingCT -- confidential transactions (cannot see amounts transacted), and signed with a ring signature so you cannot determine the 'true' inputs and outputs. No reason that cryptocurrency needs to use transparent arithmetic.

The next gen of this is mimblewimble, in which you cannot even determine an individual transaction! The block tx's are simply an aggregate of transaction and balance states!

You're worried about being tracked yet you don't think someone who would track you wouldn't go through the hoops of digging through the chain to do it?

I'm not sure where you get either of those from my comment. TLAs (not just intelligence) can and will do that digging. Marketing/surveillance firms will do it or pay blockchain analytics firms to do it. Anonymizing protocols will probably thwart all but intelligence agencies, though.

Great! When will we have one of those anonymizing protocols?

We have them now! From your GP comment

> (available now as separate coins, coming soon-ish to ETH, and probably at some point to BTC)

See Zcash, Zclassic, Monero, etc. The tech behind Zcash is called ZKSnarks is available for use in ethereum smart contracts as well.

Come on, Monero for example doesn't do this, so your argument might stand against Bitcoin specific, but not against cryptocurrency in general.

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