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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

I know it’s a different context, but with this catchy title, I can’t resist pointing out that anonymity also doesn’t mean anything.

You can have cryptocurrencies in your wallet, (on most chains) you are anonymous but have no privacy, your transaction history can be accessed by anyone.

It’s all fine and dandy, you can enjoy your anonymity, about as long as you make your first transaction.

You might be anonymous, but basically you hand over your full transaction history and balance anytime you pay for a coffee or tshirt.

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The term pseudonymous should be more popular. A crypto id is a pseudonym, right? In the sense that it is a consistent identity you have, just, not one that is initially tied to the identity you were born with.

Social media handles are usually pseudonymous at most.

I wonder where the figure of anonymity is. With writing style analysis, correlating pseudonyms is probably pretty easy these days. Maybe we’ll all start writing our ideas into LLMs and have them do the talking…

That's why Bitcoin isn't anonymous. Use Monero XMR instead. Much more private. Transactions can't be tracked. (Some very advanced techniques might, but they are in the process of fixing it. Unlike BTC, they do care)

you typically don't have one wallet and you (should at least attempt to) never reuse them either.

Do you mean a wallet per transaction?

And if you simply have multiple wallets and try and maintain the appearance of being disconnected, can you move funds between them without establishing a connection that unmasks you?

well the idea is to obscure it to someone looking from the outside, give enough information it can still be traced - but that's usually only possible by infosec agencies which is typically what they have access to already with normal banks.

to clarify: it can be hard to prove that two crypto addresses are the same people

There's a whole industry of commercially available products that analyze blockchains transactions for the purpose of tracing them. Anyone can simply buy these services. It is functionally accurate enough to find and prosecute criminals.

> It is functionally accurate enough to find and prosecute criminals.

Is that a high bar? I mean, you could have said that about forensic fiber analysis—and then it was revealed that the entire history of the field was just expert witnesses lying their asses off for whatever conclusion law enforcement wanted. It turns out that to prosecute criminals, being complex enough that expert witnesses can provide a smoke screen to rationalize law enforcement targeting that is actually based on prejudice and not concrete facts can be sufficient.

Nobody is being prosecuted on the basis of blockchain analysis data alone -- what I mean is that the data is good enough that that it provides information valuable enough to find the criminal in meatspace with the related physical evidence.

e.g. police look for online drug dealer with blockchain data, get warrant, bust down door, find big pile of drugs.

The point being, the data might not be "proof" on its own but it absolutely illustrates that there is no privacy on public ledgers.

depends on the wallets you use and what you do with them, being able to identify criminals is honestly a plus and if you really wanted to you could make their job *really* hard if you wanted to truly hide from an abusive government. Not being able to hide huge transactions in the millions / billions is honestly a good thing. Imagine the transparency we could get if all governments used crypto currencies instead of the walled garden that is SWIFT.

Let’s say you need three transactions a week, that’s 150 a year. How do you get the right amount of funds into these wallets? How will you get your money out? How will they not be able to track you anyway? As far as I know, you just make the identifiable wallets one hop away.

Again, I’m assuming traditional “old school” non-privacy cryptocurrencies.

There are tumbling services, where you for a fee can mix upp your transaction with lots of other users transactions to make it less obvious you where the one that transfered the credit to your burner wallet.

Kepp in mind, tumblers have also been found to keep logs that ended upp in law enforcement.

Well by design you receive crypto currency in different wallets to begin with and what funds to use, well that's simple - whatever wallet has enough cryptocurrency to cover the transaction.

not if you use Zcash with shielded addresses. zcash is based on zeroknowledge proofs ground up so anonymous by default not with some mixer addon.

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