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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

I've got other projects filling my time, but I think there's a great opportunity for someone who isn't opposed to working on an adult-themed idea using bitcoin. Selling sex toys for bitcoin, specifically. I think the anonymity of it is a huge selling point. Yes, there is still shipping to be concerned with, but in exchange for no worries about line items on credit card statements or your neighbors seeing your car at the sex shop; it might be the lesser of all evils.

If you do this and get rich, please email me to tell me it worked!

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Somebody is already doing just that: http://www.tit4bit.com/ (NSFW obviously). He or she posts on reddit as "Geekbauchery".

Except that Bitcoin isn't actually anonymous. If you have a wallet address, you can trace the blockchain, and most (if not all) exchanges that transfer BTC to dollars, or vice versa, require a lot of personal information that can be tied to that wallet.

I'm not too sure where the "bitcoin is anonymous" misinformation comes from, sadly.

> I'm not too sure where the "bitcoin is anonymous" misinformation comes from, sadly.

Saying that "bitcoin is anonymous" is indeed misleading.

But bitcoin does make it possible to stay anonymous, if you are very careful. For example, you can generate a new address and use it to receive bitcoins without revealing anything about yourself at the time of payment, and without revealing to any third party that you were paid.

Making payments without leaking any information is much more difficult. You would have to pass your bitcoins through a third party which you trust not to reveal the link between deposits and withdrawals. If you don't fully trust any such service, you can pass through multiple independent ones. Even then, somebody could correlate deposits and withdrawals by their size and timing. There exist Mixer Services (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service) which are designed to make this difficult.

Bitcoin is anonymous if you aren't an idiot about it. I mean seriously, all you have to do is generate a new address everytime you send or receive coins. Which is a click of a button.

If anything, this "Bitcoin isn't actually anonymous" is the real misinformation.

The problem still remains when you want to aggregate or split funds.

Imagine you receive small payments in 100 different addresses and then want to buy a new computer. If you create a single transaction with all those addresses as inputs, you make a big trace of a single owner of all of them.

I myself not worried about that at all - if you have to hide your stuff from someone, then the problem is not in the hiding techniques, but in the threat. Today the biggest threat is the govt, not some thieves whom you don't want to tell when you go to vacation.

Except that's still traceable. It makes it a pain in the ass, sure, but any point where you need to deal with an exchange to get money out is a point where you lose your anonymity. So it's fair to say "Bitcoin can be anonymous IF you have a way to get bitcoins without exchanging dollars for bitcoins, and IF you're only exchanging said BTC for non-physical goods that don't need to be shipped somewhere", but that's about it.

If address #1 received a coin, and then address #2 transfers the coin out, and there are no mentions of that coin in-between, then can someone be sure that address #1 and address #2 are actually the same address?

Just playing devils advocate... the only person who sees my CC statement other than me is my girlfriend. So I don't really care what is on it as long as it isn't causing a domestic problem... :-)

Using your logic that you could use Bitcoin to hide things on your CC statement I am guessing the use case for most people is hiding things from their spouses.

Playing devil's advocate re CC bills, one of my friends has always maintained that the only reason he hasn't paid for porn online is because he doesn't want his bank manager to know he's gay. (Regardless of what would appear on his bank statement, it's just not something he wanted to risk - I've never asked for an in depth reason as to why it's a risk).

I worked in IT at a bank. No one ever just reads account details for fun. If you call about a question on your account then maybe they will. But by and large employees really don't care at all. Besides, most transaction names are pretty cryptic, especially from sex sites, who often use a 3rd party service.

Former bank teller here --

I've seen it happen where a couple would be sitting down together working out some account fraud with one of the branch managers and some dubious charges would come up. In my four years working there, saw probably 3-4 couples storm out in anger related to something the other found on the account related to pornography

I get that this is, in fact, a real problem - but it's hardly one related to banking or finance. Sounds more like relationship trouble to me.

I'd be more concerned about the bitcoin conversion services showing up in some sort of record than porn since it's so easy to connect with far more questionable services. Yes, a lot of people want to be off the grid (especially financially), but the reality is that a lot of people buy into the "why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide" mantra. Even spouses.

When I bought some bitcoins, I did it with cash. I took money to a bank teller, and wired it to an account; then the service sent me the bitcoin via email. I never showed ID, so there was no way to track it to me. I suppose if someone cared enough to track a cash withdrawal they could do that, but in no way was my bank account connected with a bitcoin transaction at any time.

I'm amazed that anybody thinks the dude behind the desk is sitting around perusing people's statements, but if that's your concern, just get a credit card from a bank in another state.

Aye, my example case when talking about it with friends has been "bitcoin BSDM gear, so nobody finds out you're secretly a bondage bronie"

Have you ever seen the movie Middle Men? It's about some Internet entrepreneurs who setup a payment processor for porn sites. The transaction would show up as "24/7 billing" on your credit card statements. Definitely worth watching.

I think that hiding things on a CC statement is a feature. There's a reason so many "adult websites" advertise the fact that they'll bill you with a nondescript name when they charge you.

> I think that hiding things on a CC statement is a feature. There's a reason so many "adult websites" advertise the fact that they'll bill you with a nondescript name when they charge you.

Bank employees learn to associate these merchants with their products pretty quickly though, as customers call up querying charges on their credit cards (read: didn't read the small print when ordering the item).

But in the end, everyone knows what "CCBill" is.

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