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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

Are there any crypto-currencies that are not anonymous? I like secure, modern, low cost transactions, but I don't like the anonymity. I want a currency where everyone knows how much I spent, what I bought, and it applies to everyone. Does that exist?

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Every transaction to every address is public with blockchain technology. The tricky bit is associating an address with a particular human...

This would affect any attempt at making something like this. I'm not sure that you can enforce the human/address connection in software.

> I'm not sure that you can enforce the human/address connection in software.

It's a hard challenge, but not impossible. Online banking (mostly) works because it's possible.

That's not enforced by the software. And a person can have more than one bank account.

I think that such a currency would have a particularly low buy-in from people, making it quite difficult to get off the ground. Simple privacy like "I don't want my friend who I'm dieting with to know I sneaked off to get a burger" is just the start of the issues...

I believe you that many people wouldn't want this; but I'm curious about something like that. It'd be fun to try.

I don't need to keep it a secret that I'm eating a burger, for example. It's pretty fun and liberating to have as few secrets as possible. Less things to worry about keeping secret, less work (and I'm lazy).

Just Tweet your Bitcoin address. All Bitcoin transactions are inherently public in that everyone knows which addresses have sent how much to which other addresses; the only anonymity is that nobody knows who (as in which real-world person) owns/controls the address.

That doesn't address the stated " it applies to everyone" requirement.

Or if you really want to prove it, use your Bitcoin address to sign a message containing your Twitter ID.

Bitcoin is not especially anonymous. Researchers have demonstrated techniques for de-anonymizing users through transactions: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/596.pdf

really i might not know your name but if i tried hard enough i could trace the blockchain to where you bought it and look at the transaction, price of items, value at that time, and figure it out... but id never know it was you ;)

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