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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that since an alternative currency is still pretty purely hypothetical, we don't know with any certainty that it wouldn't be subject to similar abuses.

Moreover, aside from inflation, the other abuses you list are essentially abuses of power and if governments maintain power - their official monopoly of force and violence, they will continue to be able to engage in these other actions.

EI, I don't think there is any imaginable electronic currency that couldn't be "taken" from you if a group of armed men burst in, seized your computer and demanded your passwords. And if bitcoins became ubiquitous, the state certainly would believe that you owed taxes on your bitcoin transactions and it would send it's armed-men to collect.

Edit: grammar

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With a Truecrypt partition you could show them your insignificant bitcoin wallet, and only go back to your regular bitcoin wallet after they leave.

True this would currently require a lot more security consciousness than most people have, but conceivably all the necessary features could be built into a bitcoin client.

Actually, Bitcoin transactions are public - it's inherent in the scheme that verifies the transactions. Thus determining a person's net worth should be extremely easy.

This fact might make bit coin less appealing than cash for many things where anonymity is important.

(Also, Whether having public transactions would be enough to make the transaction "work" would be a different question - what happens when you don't delivery the promised goods - but that's a different question).

There are a number of escrow services available for Bitcoin transactions. https://clearcoin.appspot.com/ for example.

I think a lot of that problem disappears when you start using separate receive addresses with each transaction. Yes, that can become a bit of a pain, but it's more than doable.

From what I remember, the default of the GUI, at least, is to generate you a new receive address as soon as you receive something on your current address. That should remove a lot of the problems of tracking net worth.

No, you don't understand... a look at the article will show that publicness is inherent in the protocol...

Without a public "audit trail", the problem of re-using bitcoins (which are just numbers) you hypothetically "spent" would clearly unsolvable (though I'm doubtful if you could truly free of this problem even with the public audit trail).

"No, you don't understand..."

I wouldn't be so quick to judge. What if you are the one who doesn't understand? It's just a conversation, leave the door open that you might learn something too.

You are correct that there is an audit trail, but it's somewhat anonymous. Every time I get paid, I can generate a new BTC address, and I have a new chunk of money that's potentially anonymous. Unless the person who paid me spills the beans, no one knows that I have that money, and even if you could figure out what that money was spent on, you still wouldn't be able to connect it back to me, without the help of the person who paid me.

You could also use some sort of network/behavior analysis to guess who was using the money, but that's far from "trivial". And it requires that you already know who is behind quite a large percentage of transactions, so there's a bit of a bootstrapping problem.

"Every time I get paid, I can generate a new BTC address"

Yeah, that was kind of my point, too. I mean obviously it's audit-able, but how much does that help when each and every transaction that I partake in is in its own little 'world', unlinked with any other transaction? And in fact, as I commented earlier, the GUI at least will generate you a new address automatically after each transaction, just to make that whole process easier.

OK...

I would be more credulous if you could show a path from me, say, working for someone to me, say buying something at a store and show that I couldn't say, buying two of that something by doing two different anonymous transactions.

- My argument is that the factor prevents me from using my information twice is the factor that identifies me (how does X know that "coin" Y belongs to Z? - The audit trail - if the audit trail can't show this, the whole app break. If the audit trail does show this, the state can figure things out).

Once I'm identified by other bitcoin participants, I'm identified by everyone and so the state will say "hey, you're transacting, you owe taxes"...

Nobody knows that YOU have the Bitcoins. What they know is that "coin" Y is at Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh. There is only one way to connect Bitcoin address 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh with Person B: By Person A opening his/her big fat mouth.

Otherwise, the only thing you know about the owner of 19FD9iREicdxheyt654FD6fsgdsfh is approximately what planet they live on.

Why don't you include inflation in that list?

Inflation is pretty much directly based on the control of the currency.

While I don't necessarily advocate a society using gold-money, it's an example of a situation where the state couldn't directly control the currency. A state in such a society could still tax and arbitrarily confiscate money but it couldn't create inflation (well, under normal circumstances...).

If I'm not mistaken, at least in US you can't be forced to reveal your password?

Then they do you for "contempt of court" rather than whatever they charged you with originally, surprise surprise the sentence is the same.

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