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Comment by arosier | Hacker News Reader

> Although bitcoin transactions are intended to be anonymous and difficult to track, ProPublica was able to trace four of the payments.

I didn’t think Bitcoin transactions were intended to be anonymous and difficult to track, why would Bitcoin use a public ledger if that was the intention? I was under the impression other cryptocurrencies are trying to solve for “anonymous and difficult to track.”

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The term is pseudonymous - the list of all transactions is available for anyone to look at but in theory you can't link bitcoin addresses to people.

However, in practice, most people buy bitcoins via a method that requires ID, which links their ID to one of their addresses. Multiple addresses can then be linked together by cluster analysis based on usage patterns

They are intended to be roughly anonymous, as in not-identifiable, not untraceable. Bitcoin also predates all other cryptocurrencies, and is the most widely used or prolific.

Last I checked, there were also several operational mixing services that would gladly launder your funds for you (for a nominal fee). It's more surprising to me that they didn't end up using a system like this before performing the final payment capture. But maybe if they're overseas, they don't care?

What other cryptocurrencies are trying to solve is making transactions anonymous and hidden by default. You can hide your identity and tumble your coins to achieve both in bitcoin if you know what you are doing. But there are plenty of stories of people who did not know how to use Bitcoin in an anonymous way and investigators were able to track transactions.

They are anonymous because although you can see the ledger, you don’t know who is the owner. All the ledger says is ‘whoever knows the private key for this public key can spend this money’. You can still catch people once they convert it to normal currencies though.

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