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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrencies log all transactions in a world-readable log. Their only privacy is pseudonymity, which is very easily breached. And it's quite a hassle to acquire without going through an exchange which logs all your personal information for AML anyway.

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This used to be the case, but not anymore. As mentioned in one of the parent comments, there are now cryptocurrencies that provide anonymity as well, check Monero [1] and Zcash [2].

[1] https://getmonero.org/home

[2] https://z.cash/

And you can bet if they gain any traction, they will be dealt with swiftly by the US government under the guise of "war on drugs".

This has been repeated so many times now that it makes my head hurt to think anyone actually believes you're going to have anonymity in banking/money exchanges.

Do you think we are in the final days of cash? Will we return to the pure debt based economies of the ancient world and never change course?

The US government's relationship with the global banking network is the result of very particular conditions following the end of the second world war and the end of the cold war. As these conditions shift over the next 10-20 years I'm not sure we can predict that these anti-privacy priorities will be maintained.

> Cryptocurrencies log all transactions in a world-readable log.

True for now but there's some interesting experiments in this space, such as zero knowledge proofs, currently in dash and porting to ethereum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge...).

> And it's quite a hassle to acquire without going through an exchange which logs all your personal information for AML anyway.

Also true, but crypto to crypto exchanges are relatively lax on regulation. It'd be trivial to trade into an anonymous coin, mix, then back to a public coin for some degree of anonymity.

> very easily breached

What happens when someone exchanges one currency for another?

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