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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

The internet initially was an anonymous way to access information. Now its the least anonymous as corporations, ISPs, government and ad agencies watch what you do.

Crypto currencies used to be anonymous too, wont be long before everyone is watching your wallet as well.

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Cryptocurrency was never been anonymous without expending a fair amount of effort to keep it so until very recently. The entire chain of every transaction ever is kept on a publicly accessible ledger for most implementations, how can you have any expectation of anonymity in that case?

Monero and dash both have fairly good privacy built into the protocol [1] [2], although monero suffers from large transaction sizes and dash suffers from centralization as a result of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)#Privac...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_(cryptocurrency)#PrivateS...

Disclaimer: I have no monero or dash, but I do have various other cryptocurrencies.

>until very recently

Was meant to cover those particular cases, which were created specifically to deal with the lack of anonymity within Bitcoin and its derivatives, as far as I know.

Fair enough, I just figured others may find the exceptions interesting.

And to be fair, both of those cryptocurrencies have been around for ~3 years now, which is practically ancient history in this field.

The internet was anonymous only because it was obscure. The Man barely knew it existed, and couldn't be bothered to figure out how to track people.

Just like other types of security, anonymity through obscurity is a bad idea and only works while your obscurity holds out.

Cryptocurrencies are going through the same transition. Initially they seemed anonymous because nobody with power cared about them. Now that's changing.

If you care about being anonymous, take steps to ensure that it works even if The Man starts looking.

"The Man" is exactly who researched, designed, and developed the precursor to the internet. For a long time it was a closed ring of approved members that had access to it. Your real name was tied directly to your only account.

The money for the internet (Or the much better name: "Intergalactic Computer Network") came out of the budget for a ballistic missile defence program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

I'm sure you know The Man evolved the Internet from ARPANET so they clearly knew of its existence. Unless you meant to say that The Man didn't think much of tracking people on the Internet until it become economically viable when it reached critical mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_In...

Here, "The Man" refers to law enforcement, not the government in general.

Cryptos were never anonymous. They always showed the entire transaction log to everyone. Only a matter of time before you have to pull it out to do anything with it in the fiat economy, at which point your activity can be tracked backwards and attributed to you.

They are not anonymous if you used Coinbase but you don’t have to use Coinbase. You can generate your own bitcoin address in JS and transact bitcoin

Regardless of whether you use Coinbase or your own wallet, Bitcoin and most other cryptocoins are not "anonymous" as it would be traditionally considered. See "A Fistful of Bitcoins Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names" [1].

The original bitcoin whitepaper doesn't mention anonymity or privacy anywhere. What it does show is a partition between identities and transactions. Transactions can take place without ever naming an identity. But we've learned in the meantime that this partition is not sufficient, in practice. All it takes is one transaction where some part of your identity or personal information is disclosed (shipping address, e.g.). From there, the transaction history could be followed to determine where you got the money from (strip club, silk road, etc). Having multiple independent addresses mitigates some of the impact but it's not enough to describe it as "anonymous".

Case in point: "Stealing bitcoins with badges: How Silk Road’s dirty cops got caught" [2]. TL;DR Chainalysis followed the transactions on the ledger.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2714846-A-Fistful-of...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/stealing-bitcoin...

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