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Comment by hagakure0c | Hacker News Reader

Sooner or later people will start to revolt and either go back to use semi-anonymous cash or truly anonymous payment systems like bitcoin. Google and advertising will then be in the dark.

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Bitcoin is not "truly anonymous" by default. All transactions are public and can be traced back to you, unless you use non-logging bitcoin mixers for every single transaction.

No, you just mix a bunch, and then use them. But you must use VPNs and/or Tor, to avoid linkage by IP address. If you want compartmentalization, just mix into separate wallets. And if you want strong compartmentalization, do everything via Tor, and put those wallets in separate VMs (such as Whonix).

Indeed, Bitcoin can be anonymous if there is enough critical mass. But that requires far more involment than the average person is willing to do. Cash is easy and simple.

Only if we don't all but lose the option of cash before then. The war on cash is being waged, more in some countries than others, but is a political trend to envision a future without cash.

Would not it be easier to make a law forbidding transferring personal information without a person's consent? Not opt-out, but rather opt-in scheme. Companies like Google just exploit a lack of regulation.

As usual, the European Union has some good intentions in this area:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...

We'll see how that goes. I have a feeling most users will just opt in without much care.

Bitcoin: I don't want Google to have access to a private ledger of my transactions, so instead I'm going to make all of my transactions available via a public ledger.

People, in general, do not seem to care about privacy so long as they are getting something in return. So, yes, some people will revolt but not a critical mass.

How anonymous is cash really? All money bills have serial numbers that could automatically be correlated with ATMs and your time/location data.

I read an article about a year ago that about 50% of China's ATM had this serial number recording capability, and that at least some compuer-connected cash counters had it too. I was highly sceptical, but then I found a cash counter that had this capability listed on its specifications page. I don't have time right now to find it again, but they are out there and it's already being done at some places. Okay, maybe not correlated, but recorded for sure.

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