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Comment by gigantor | Hacker News Reader

Of course Bitcoin is not anonymous. The moment you make a purchase that contains some personal information about you (whether your name, IP, address, etc.) with your current wallet, any future purchases can be mapped back to you using your purchase graph. Difficult, yes, but the frequent intent with security is not to stop things cold in its tracks, but to make it such a chore to thwart all but the most dedicated intruders.

But that's not the point of Bitcoin's anonymous capabilities. The relative ease which you can create multiple wallets and keep your questionable Silk Road and Wikileaks donation purchases separate, as opposed to creating multiple offshore bank accounts in Switzerland, can establish a high degree of anonymity. Almost like how drug dealers use prepaid cell phones and discard them for new ones the moment they suspect something is compromised.

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But if you ever transfer money from your secret wallet to your identifiable wallet, the anonymity gets a lot weaker.

Could a service that creates a new ´wallet´ for every single transaction provide effectively unbreakable anonymity? Forgive me if the question doesn´t make sense... I haven´t used bitcoin.

Even if it was possible to create new wallets for every transaction, wouldn't you want to spend it somehow? Then, the "flow" of cash from a subset of wallets at the same time indicates _something_.

A system could create, manage and automate a 'cloud' of several hundred wallets, all shifting small amounts of money around at random intervals. When the owner decided to make a particular payment, he could set a target sum to be accumulated by a single wallet, and within a few hours (or days), make payment from there.

Once this system had a few users, the difficulty of tracing any particular wallet 'owner' would be significant.

all shifting small amounts of money around at random intervals

I suspect that "random" in this instance would have to be very carefully defined, as a lot of signals only become more apparent (to the human eye) when cloaked with the right type of noise.

If these nodes aren't shared between users then you're not really getting anything more than minor obfuscation. If they are shared then you in fact have a third party cloudbank that hopefully is trustworthy and the money cloud aspect is a distraction that doesn't provide any benefits.

Such service could work, although it could possibly create a nuisance for continuosly updating your wallet that are tied to other services such as bitcoin mining deposit accounts, or if you ever treated your bitcoin wallet to handle monthly subscriptions, like a credit card. For the sake of true anonymity though, such inconvenience may still be worth it.

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