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Re:The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion by icebraining on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @06:20AM (#8661870)
If you're buying a boat or a car, you'll have to do a big transfer. But how is that any different than buying something expensive using a bank account? It's not a new problem with cryptocurrencies.
Re:The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion by throwaway84356 on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @07:39AM (#8662048)
Your bank wire doesn't leak the balance of your account to the recipient. It is a new and unique problem with some cryptocurrencies. Of course, we have already proposed solutions to problem this with ring signatures, stealth addresses, 'coinjoin', 'zerocash', 'TITAN', etc.
Re:The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion by icebraining on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @07:47AM (#8662073)
As I wrote, you can simply move money around so that the final transfer doesn't reveal your original balance, e.g. if I have a balance on address A of 30 and I want to pay something that costs 4, I can just create multiple addresses where I move and subdivide the 30 until the last address only has a little over 4.

The recipient has no sure way of knowing that the original address was mine - I might just have withdrawn from a service like Coinbase.

Re:The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion by mehwoot on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @06:59AM (#8661960)
than buying something expensive using a bank account

Because a robber can't demand you transfer money from your bank account and expect not to be traced, that's why.