Can't you (semi-) anonymously receive money via Paypal?

I could be wrong but I seem to remember paypal will require KYC at some point past a certain amount of money coming into the account (?)

You can have agreements with vendots? How would anyone but you and the vendor know anything about that?

> anonymity is only possible with cryptocurrencies and cash-by-mail. The easiest one (anonymity wise) is Monero and the most popular one is Bitcoin.

Can we just stop with the "Bitcoin is anonymous" bullshit here?

Anybody here is smart enough to know better, so it just earmarks you as another fucking crypto-shill.

I think you have some kind of point but it's lost by being rude

Yeah, fair criticism. But I'm just so over the insane mass hallucination these planet burning pyramid scheme grifters keep wanting to convince everybody is real. There are no clothes, there isn't even a damned emperor. They all deserver to be called out and ridiculed at every sighting. And yeah, I'm rude while doing that.

> How about you just shut the fuck up and we'll keep saving in Bitcoin and you can keep your infinitely inflating dollars.

bitcoin is losing value. It's really not a hedge against inflation as you propose. As more people need what little money they have leftover from losing it in bitcoin, they'll pull the remaining fraction of their savings out and reduce the price of bitcoin. The price is just barely above $20,000 now. Most miners are running on fossil fuels consuming electricity greater than that of countries. You need to get a grip because your ponzi scheme is collapsing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/bitcoin-falls-fresh-18-m...

It's been a hedge against inflation for me for nine years thanks. I'm not pulling a cent out. Those people are selling a scarce asset to me, and thousands like me, and they can only sell to us once. Most miners are running on stranded, excess renewable energy that can't be used for anything else. A ponzi scheme implies an exit. We're never swapping back to dollars that can be printed out of thin air.

> It's been a hedge against inflation for me for nine years thanks.

For a period of record low inflation excluding 2021 and the current year? Sure. During 2021 and 2022? Only price falls for Bitcoin.

> Most miners are running on stranded, excess renewable energy that can't be used for anything else.

Bullshit. There is opportunity cost to this electricity use, and it keeps fossil fuel power plants open longer than they would have otherwise been. I don't think you need me to tell you how big of a crisis climate change is.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/bitcoin-miners-align-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-...

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/bitcoins-puzzle-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bitcoin-is-re...

We'll revisit that in a few years shall we? After continued inflation caused by endless QE.

Sounds like you have a problem with fossil fuels and the subsidies that exist for them. I suggest you direct your anger there instead of trying to police what calculations people choose to do.

Bitcoin is anonymous (ie your key is not linked to your identity) but not private (all your transactions can be seen)

It's somewhere between (not including) anonymous and multi-pseudonymous.

Each address is a random pseudonym. A wallet is a collection of pseudonyms but it's secret that they belong together. Except network analysis can infer that some of them do. Pseudonyms are persistent, can't "change them", only transfer coins out of the pseudonym to a different one, i.e. log a transaction.

Bitcoin is anonymous in the sense that you don't necessarily need to link your wallet to your real name, it's just not the best choice for privacy since transaction details are public. Besides, mixing services exist.

> Besides, mixing services exist.

And don't work. They were revealed to be useless way back when the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange crypto grifters pulled the first high profile scam, and they got hounded through all the "mixers" anyway. Chainalysis has been able to see straight through "crypto mixers" for almost a decade. (Yeah, there are probably way that right now you can't track bitcoin through other crypto currencies and back into bitcoin, maybe... But we are now a long long way from "good advice to an old guy who want to sell macOS utilities anonymously")

Mixers on programmable blockchains like TornadoCash do seem to provide strong anonymity when used correctly. If you have evidence suggesting its cryptography can easily be cracked, feel free to point to that.

If HN was anonymous, then we couldn't see that two posts were made by the same account or not. But HN has pseudonyms with (unlimited?) pseudonyms per person, and Bitcoin is a bit like that, except that it's commonplace to have many pseudonyms (wallet).

HN is also similar to a blockchain in another regard - You can't really delete your account and its content, which really annoys me to be honest. I like to purge online accounts from time to time, but that's not possible with HN.

Or do you?

> Can we just stop with the "Bitcoin is anonymous" bullshit here?

Care to point to Satoshi’s real identity since anonymity in Bitcoin is bullshit?

They didn't use any modern services - we mainly know of an old, idle account. If they were actually active today and we knew which transactions to look at, there would be some trail to follow. So, that isn't a counterexample you're after.

All of their transactions are visible in the ledger, not hard to find. The same tools they used still exist today, except with additional privacy enhancements like some chains using zk-SNARKs.

The only weak points are exchanges. The OP can decide how anonymous they want to be - complete anonymity would imply not exchanging to fiat at all.

The weak points are literally anything beyond transfers between clean accounts. Want to buy anything? It needs to be picked up. Want to transfer money to someone? They can be asked about you. Want to pay for services? You need to access them in a safe way. Even submitting new transactions, you could be traced by enough nodes if someone actually cared.

I don't disagree that most of them are not practical for a rando developer who wants to be anonymous, but I'm still annoyed at "the only weak point is...".

If you are an anon dev and you share your real identity with a counterparty, you aren’t doing a great job at staying anonymous.

Anybody can start a new crypto wallet and receive funds into it, and then make transactions and keep that value on-chain to remain anonymous. There are a number of anon devs in the Ethereum ecosystem doing just this.

With enough effort your IP might be traceable if you do something like mint a token from a compromised website. But advanced methods also exist to break anonymity in systems like Tor, VPNs and cash which we often consider to have strong properties of privacy and anonymity, and to this nobody would refute as “bullshit.”

No, we can't. Bitcoin *is* anonymous against average Joe which is what the OP needs here.

Pretty irrelevant here but for your fucking information, with significant expert effort, Bitcoin *can* be also anonymous against big actors.

I'm being tongue in cheek here, but to support your point a little, if Bitcoin was not generally anonymous in nature, we'd know who Satoshi is.. no? :-)

Does Satoshi regularly receive bitcoin donations and convert them to USD? If he did I'm reasonably certain that someone could figure out his identity. The list of people that the US Govt (as an example) wanted to find and couldn't trace through bitcoin transactions is very short...