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Re:It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble – It's Far Worse by lubujackson on Thursday December 07, 2017 @12:51AM (#15867916)
Triple-entry accounting, basically. There was an article on here a few months ago that went into depth on the issue.

Double-entry accounting made it much harder to cook the books (a record of where money is coming from and a record of where it is going). Blockchains store every transaction within the coin itself and are validated by the entire network as valid transactions.

People promote Bitcoin as anonymous, but it's actually the opposite - every transaction is traceable and open source, even if the accounts are not tied to a person directly.

There are uses for this but I think the unintended consequences remain to be seen. I think of how people were able to be identified by that Netflix ratings datadump a few years ago, so imagine how easy it would be if Bitcoin became a common currency? I am not positive this is possible (I think it is?) but imagine I buy an apple from Whole Foods and pay with Bitcoin. Now I know what account they use and I can go back through the blockchain to see every other transaction they've ever made: bam, now I know all financial data about Whole Foods over Bitcoin including which accounts pay them the most and the datestamps of those transactions.

Re:It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble – It's Far Worse by cypherpunks01 on Thursday December 07, 2017 @10:19AM (#15870741)
Re:It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble – It's Far Worse by flowctrl on Thursday December 07, 2017 @01:49AM (#15868209)
> but imagine I buy an apple from Whole Foods and pay with Bitcoin. Now I know what account they use

An application like this would use a new address for every transaction, and never use it again. There are desktop software wallets that do this, in the interests of privacy.

Re:It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble – It's Far Worse by JauntyHatAngle on Thursday December 07, 2017 @12:56AM (#15867931)
Just a quick point here, but

>Blockchains store every transaction within the coin itself and are validated by the entire network as valid transactions.

Is true for bitcoin, but is not necessarily true for all blockchains. Bitcoin != blockchain, even though Bitcoin is the original blockchain.