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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

Dollars printing is controlled by the government. You can regulate the total amount of cash in circulation.

Additionally, each tender can be traced thanks to its number, making it possible (but difficult) for the forces to track where tender comes from.

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It may be worth noting that Bitcoins are also uniquely identified and can be traced back through all transactions.

But who the hell is KrayzBoy32@gmail.com doing this transaction? Let's ask google...Oh, he was behind 7 proxies, so we don't really know.

There's no way of identifying the person reliably, if s/he doesn't disclose a name.

> he was behind 7 proxies

Using proxies seems like the digital equivalent of using middlemen for cash transactions. If I use enough middlemen it will be really, really hard to identify me reliably. Any differences I've missed?

Just that it doesn't cost anything to use proxies whereas middlemen generally take a cut from the transaction in real world.

Actually as far as I know this is solved by using "exchanges" outside jurisdiction of feared country, where you can send some bitcoins and receive other.

It doesn't seem like that's 100% the case, as you can generate a new bitcoin address for every transaction.

Unless there's some way to associate addresses as coming from a single wallet, which I do not think is the case.

This may be nitpicking, but the amount of cash printed by a government has very little to do with the actual money supply of a curreny.

I refer you to this Wikipedia article for details (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply). Specifically the table indicating the types of money.

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