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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Only if you and everyone you ever deal with have perfect security. As soon as one person’s identity is leaked, that opens the possibility of a real-world ID being linked to a wallet.

This story from about a year ago also showed how that worked with investigators tracing it link by link:

https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

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Future proof security. I think that people discount that aspect of it. If your identity is cracked at any point in the future, perhaps using methods yet to be invented, all your transactions will still be there on the blockchain. I once heard someone refer to the blockchain as prosecution futures, and that is about right.

Exactly - and that’s especially true if laws or other things change. For example, suppose that you made a donation to the political party which lost a key election to an authoritarian – are you sleeping easy at night wondering whether they have a data mining team?

In your hypothetical scenario, I think I would sleep easier having tried to stop it, then to be in the same world but having done nothing to stop it.

There's no real alternative. You rely on the secrets technology we currently have, knowing it might not be future-proof for your entire lifetime, or you don't use secrets technology at all (and I guess live in fear of all possible futures?)

The chance of somebody storing my WireGuard traffic from a local public hotspot to be able to hopefully decode it at some point in the future is far less than someone sniffing dns and http traffic I send from the same hotspot today.

The value of breaking my communication now compared with in 10 years time is far higher too. My bank will have destroyed the records of my dealings in a decades time for example.

Bitcoin’s ledger is specifically designed to be kept forever though. You don’t need to target me today in the how if future payoff

I get the point you’re trying to convey but - at least in the US - you’re legally required to make donations to political candidates publicly anyway, so this isn’t really a regression over the status quo.

That's why you make your anonymous donation to the "Friends of John Smith" organisation, who is completely unaffiliated with John Smith and is merely interested in seeing him elected to office

This is the kind of thing that Monero and team solved iirc.

"Leaked" also includes cashing in or out of Bitcoin.

Or using a business which is required to report transactions, using a site which gets hacked, etc. I don’t think people sufficiently weight the risk of having a ledger which can’t be redacted – for example, I’d imagine there were a lot of people in Weimar Germany who did not think twice about donating to a synagogue or other organization which you would not want have wanted linked to your bank account a decade later.

This can be true for basically anything:

Maybe you own a car. In 10 years time a green authoritarian communist group starts to suspect anybody who owned a car, you are sent to a re-education facility.

Maybe you are environmentally conscious and bought solar panels. In ten years time an anti environmental fascist group comes to power. You are disappeared.

You make some negative comments about AI at a dinner party. The host has an Alexa home automation system. In ten years time when government is run by AI. You are assigned to sewer cleaning duty, a tragic accident happens.

Summarizing: It's not a really strong argument.

However, if you are doing things that can get you arrested today; That's another story, then you should be paranoid and not use bitcoin. Maybe Monero instead? Although, that's not watertight either.

> You make some negative comments about AI at a dinner party. The host has an Alexa home automation system.

Honestly, I feel uneasy when I know there is any active microphone recording.

Surely they are atleast building some user profile from keywords.

As computations get cheaper, commercial mass surveillance will get really bad.

Pseudonymity has exactly the same problem.

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