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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

>This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?

There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of. It's this latter group of people that, by and large, as Bitcoin started to become popular, were under the impression that it was anonymous.

Edit: It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous," back in 2008[1]. To your point, he did say this as he linked to the white paper you mentioned, but average users are less likely to read the white paper than we are.

[1]https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October...

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> "There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of."

In large part, "the average non-tech person" is not aware of a great many things because they actively ignore or dismiss those who know those things and try to warn them in advance of impending troubles they face due to their faulty Facebook acquired "knowledge" about any topic of great importance or significance (until after they're bitten in the ass by it, at which point they blame those same people they previously ignored). Network security issues are one easy example. We're ridiculed as "paranoid neck-beards" for calling out clear and obvious security issues right up until something bad happens and huge troves of personal/private data are leaked or stolen, and then we're raked over the coals for not somehow magically fixing an issue that we were previously told were "unimportant paranoid perfectionism".

How about the average journalist? Are they not supposed to check claims and details and assumptions? Bah who am I kidding. Gumshoes never existed.

How much sway does the “average journalist” have on Tech matters relative to, let’s say, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, etc. who have all publicly promoted crypto currency?

Thiel literally was calling out bank CEOs and Warren Buffett a day or so ago for preventing the future.

They’re not preventing the future so much as they are not buying into the hype. That speech from Thiel was totally unprofessional and ill-suited to man of his station. If he’s so confident about crypto, he doesn’t need to insult successful people to achieve his aims. I’ll take the classiness of a Warren Buffet over that meanness any day.

What interests me is that so many people discuss the same thing and still seem to come away with entirely different takes.

You can be anonymous if you deal with BTC exclusively just as though you would with cash. But, and this is a very big but: if you use the same addresses repeatedly or if the addresses that you use can be linked and your identity can be tied to one of the addresses then all of your linked transactions are now no longer anonymous.

So you're anonymous right up to the point that you aren't, and then it works retroactively on anything that can be tied to that same identity.

Cash doesn't really have that property, and is therefore more anonymous than BTC, anonymity is in principle a boolean but there appear to be grades of anonymity when you start looking at it more closely. Anonymity as in 'the state of knowledge about an individual' vs 'anonymity, the level of anonymity that an individual can expect as the use of a particular method of payment' are two different concepts that we lump together as though they are the same thing.

I prefer to divide anonymous and pseudonymous.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It's baked into the protocol. Every transaction is public, and authenticated and authorized via cryptography. But every transaction has a name attached... Just not a name immediately linked to the human being responsible for executing the transaction.

Once that link is made, the blockchain becomes a towering monument to all that name's sins.

Contrast with a chan site, where the default configuration is that every post has a unique identifier independent from any posts previously made by an author. Depending on what data the administrator is collecting, those posts may be reversible to a human being, but tugging on one piece of the thread does not unravel the tapestry because a person's posts aren't tied to each other by default.

(HN is pseudonymous too. I post under a handle. I prefer not to link this handle to my public name. It would not take much effort to do so, and once somebody did, every comment I've ever made is immediately searchable).

> It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous"

Am I nitpicking if I say that's actually true? Anonymous means "not identified by name; of unknown identity". Disguised people can also be anonymous. The fine print is that your disguise won't help you much when you go visit your family and you're subject to gait profiling.

I agree with your first paragraph but your edit is repeating the same non-sequitur made by the article. I don't know why journalists and people in these discussions keep referring back to Satoshi's statements as if they mean anything. The average non-tech person still has no idea who that is, will never care who that is, was not following bitcoin back in 2008 and has no reason to care about a random comment on a mailing list or in a whitepaper. The average cryptographer or hardcore blockchain person also probably has no reason to care about them. The only reason to bring it up at all just seems to be part of the myth-building.

>The only reason to bring it up at all just seems to be part of the myth-building.

I don't understand how this can be what you think I'm getting at, when my post was myth-busting. You agree with me that most average, non-tech-oriented people seemed to misunderstand that Bitcoin was largely anonymous. Now, those assumptions had to come from somewhere, right? I'm not saying they know who Satoshi is, or what a Bitcoin whitepaper is at all, nor am I saying Satoshi should be lionized or mythologized. But what I am doing is pointing to rhetoric used early on in Bitcoin's life that could've easily made it's way into the lexicon of the less technically-minded and explain how we ended up there.

An analysis of how the myth was built, as it were, rather than further building of the myth.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot of sense. But I honestly don't think you could chalk it up to any statements made by Satoshi or anyone else in particular. The tech press in general has a problem with not understanding cryptography or "privacy tech" or whatever. That's not a new thing. It really doesn't help that in the last several years there are privacycoin pushers who muddy the waters with confusing marketing statements that are misleading to anyone who doesn't bury themselves in crypto jargon.

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