Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I need to take exception with your first three characterizations, which imply that btc is used for these activities because it is anonymous and untraceable--it is neither.

Zerocoin is those things.

View on HN

Bitcoin is 'anonymous enough' given the current regulatory environment. As the regulation catches up, Bitcoin will evolve to be precisely as fungible as is required to support its users. You see that happening now with Gregory Maxwell's research. The protocal can and does evolve. Fungibility has opportunity costs, and Bitcoin simply hasn't needed to add these features in yet.

This assumption of "Bitcoin will evolve" ignores the fact that evolution requires forks.

Bitcoin vs Bitcoin XT bull$$$$ is a major example. Will BTC actually be able to evolve this relatively minor technical challenge?

As Bitcoin vs Bitcoin XT has shown us, it is the BTC Community that needs to evolve, not BTC protocol itself.

I don't understand your point here. Bitcoin has changed consensus multiple times. All that was demonstrated by the Bitcoin XT proposition was that there is some support(though not much) for a change of project maintainership. If you're concerned about whether bitcoin could support changes, that's fair, it may not. Thus far it has.

The opinions of the teenagers on r/bitcoin don't matter much, as very few of them are either: coders, miners, or even users.

Not every protocol change is controversial enough to prevent the majority from upgrading.

There are services to launder and mix your bitcoins. There are also people that don't care about privacy but are more concerned of the bank ability to freeze their account.

The characteristics of anonymous and untraceable do not have a monopoly on being the only characteristics that can help a tool perform those first three characterised tasks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com