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Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they're confused, I think the vast majority of people involved in crypto or who are spectators of crypto are confused. I have repeatedly heard that crypto enables "anonymous" transactions for years.

Also he literally links the original paper, quoting the part where it talks about transactions being harder to trace. "without telling who the parties are".

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The "without telling who the parties are" is more about non-personal identifiers. Similar to how knowing your IP address doesn't really identify you by itself, you need to go through (often several levels of) other parties to get that info. Which in addition is ephemeral, others will be assigned your IP and tracing which requests were made by you vs. someone else is a lot harder than tracing a credit-card.

This seems to be lost on a lot of folks, which I find strange in a tech-centric forum. Bitcoin is perfectly pseudonymous, as it strives to be, and not anonymous, which it has never attempted to be.

My recollection is that Satoshi wanted people to rotate public keys after every use exactly to have anonymity.

That's still not anonymity; it's just pseudonymity with more masks.

And some wallets do this automatically. But if you send a transaction and the change flows directly from your previous wallet to your next wallet, you're not accomplishing much.

The Bitcoin designers did not pretend it was anonymous – it’s obviously not to anyone who looks at the architecture! - but the people selling Bitcoin have loudly lied about this since the beginning, however. If you search here you’ll find like 14 years of people pointing out that it’s easily traced and getting a bunch of word salad from the sales guys in response.

Well, "crypto" does allow that--and has for years!--using zero-knowledge proofs (as in Zcash), at least within some bounds (that I would say are quite reasonable for conversational purposes... hell: someone in the government seems to think this stuff works, hence the sanctions on Tornado Cash); Bitcoin, one very specific technology from crypto, however, does not.

Of course, all of that is true. I'm only saying that people seem to believe it is inherent to crypto.

This is the only informed comment in the entire thread.

I came here hoping for an interesting discussion about Monero, ZCash, Tornado Cash on Ethereum, and Halo/ZK proofs. Disappointing!

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