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Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

If you think that Bitcoin transactions are anonymous then you are grossly mistaken. All transactions are part of PUBLIC ledger and are there to stay forever. The illusion of anonimity comes from thr fact that you don’t need an ID to create a Bitcoin wallet, but still it’s possible to trace your transactions back to you.

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From my parent comment:

> And about anonymity. Yes, Bitcoin itself is not at all anonymous. Everything's in the public blockchain. But one can use mixing services, through Tor, and get different Bitcoin. Which aren't linked to the starting Bitcoin, or to any identity or IPv4 address that's linked to the user in meatspace. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.

So yes, usably anonymous.

You can also launder money after swapping it, doesn't make it anonymous either.

Engage the services of your local money launderer, they're doing the same thing.

Wait, you're saying they're criminals? I wonder why the bitcoin guys aren't.

The term "criminal" can mean so many things. It's like "terrorist". One person's criminal/terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

People hurting others (what's criminal to me) will use any system that's secure, hidden, anonymous, etc. Tor is a good example. But in a sense, they serve as canaries for other users.

Well, it may or may not be possible. The ledger may record a series of transactions like A → B → C → D → E, and you may know that A belongs to Joe and E to Mary, but it's not certain that you can know whether B, C and D are decoys created by one of them (and so they actually transacted directly) or if they're other people and the money simply circulated.

There are techniques to try to find that out, but they're not infallible.

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