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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

> say, a retail store that wants to accept cryptocurrency payments without revealing its revenue to a competitor

But has anyone actually done this??

This is like a “both sides” debate - where the theoretical usecases side has literally /never/ actually shown it’s possible IRL.

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It's also trivially defeated by the kind of financial centralization that would necessarily follow in this kind of mass-adoption scenario: the payment processor (BitPay, Visa, MasterCard, whatever) can have a pool of Bitcoin transaction addresses that they use across all clients, and then commingle and convert client funds to USD (or whatever desired currency) before privately remitting the USD.

The payment processor itself would have perfect visibility into the revenue of the merchant, but that's already true today.

Lots of people in the bitcoin community regularly mix their coins out of principal.

The big problem is that people have a fundamental right to financial privacy from the public, but not (in many places) a right to financial privacy from their government. But, in the crypto world it has been difficult to achieve the first without the second. You can send funds to an exchange and then send them to a different wallet but there's the risk the exchange won't let you withdraw funds, and this type of activity is flagged as an AML risk and could be cited as actual evidence of money laundering, despite it having a very clear legal motivation behind it.

Not even just from the public, but imagine if making a payment to someone for $whatever, and that allowed that recipient to see whomever else you paid money to, and who paid you.

Lots of people would say "no thanks" to that.

I'm adding to your comment and not trying to argue (unless you want to!): There's no distinction between the public and the government. The government is made up by the public. And corporations are usually first in line anyway. Much more "public" in the cake mix right there alone.

It's hard for me to think in terms of rights. I don't know what the word even means. Legal rights? Moral rights? God-given rights? You can say I have a right not to be murdered, but that doesn't matter very much if in fact I just got murdered. All I know is that some people feel they have a "duty" for lack of a better word, to keep all their dealings as private as possible. If I were such a person, this would mean using cash, metals, and cryptocurrencies like Monero as much as possible through decentralized services. It would even mean using things like credit/debit cards to maintain a "good person" public persona. Going grey so to speak.

Doesn't that risk making them tainted and unspendable?

Neither I, nor the article, were talking about BTC privacy fundamentalists.

I'm talking about the actual IRL usecase of commercial secrecy amidst competitors.

Who are they competing with that this is an issue? Mastercard?

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