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Comment by Mimu | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my lack of knowledge but wasn't the whole point of bitcoins being anonymous? How are you anonymous with a card connected to an account?

I'm not trolling I really don't see what I'm missing.

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Decentralisation was (and still is) the point of Bitcoin; any additional perks (e.g. anonymity) are emergent. Here's a quote from the original paper:

>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

The irony being of course is that Coinbase is literally a financial instution

but given confirmation time inherent to the network, I don't see a way around doing something similar to what coinbase have done here (minus the egregious part where they hold your private key)

>Pardon my lack of knowledge but wasn't the whole point of bitcoins being anonymous?

It is about decentralization and trying to establish trust outside of the normal banks.

An interesting possible example is in the Genesis block. Satoshi added the newspaper headline:

    The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

This serves the purpose of a sorta time stamp by using a newspaper headline, but a lot of people like myself think there was also a reason of choosing that headline in particular--we think that it was part of the motivation for the creation of bitcoin--something that would be decentralized and away from banks.

So instead of a currency being centralized between governments and banks, it's centralized around a few dozen miners and developers.

The "whole point of bitcoins" is not anonymity. In fact, bitcoins aren't anonymous at all.

Kinda, it's many things to many people, I think like VOIP it will serve as the infrastructure for banks but for individual consumers it will likely never take flight, just as we still use a lot of cell phone numbers that use VOIP infrastructure.

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