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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

Value, be it in gold or silver or USD or EUR or bitcoin or cars or art, is a perceived phenomenon. Something has value because others are willing to trade it for goods and services (or for other forms of value). Gold and silver are trusted stores of value because they have been used in that capacity for centuries (and for a very long time, USD were silver certificates so there was real metal backing the paper)

The underlying value of BTC, IMO, is the anonymity feature (the ability to conduct commerce without a clear centralized record identifying you by name). Once that is compromised, it's not clear what value BTC will have.

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Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really only offers pseudo-anonymity.

The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.

Yes, I think it is possible, in the long run, to figure out who's behind a wallet, assuming that the Bitcoin use is frequent and convenient (meaning no-super-high-inconvenient-counter-measures are used, but a regular use of currency)

In that case, my concern is that I think it will be possible to determine ALL the transactions of that wallet. Making it even less anonymous than regular currencies.

I could be missing something, but if confirmed, that could be a problem for using Bitcoin as a regular currency

There are various laundering schemes, and there's nothing stopping you using new wallets constantly.

But yes, in effect, every transaction is traceable and public, AFAICT.

Yes, I understand that there are things that you can do. But, as those are in the way of convenience, we can assume that not everyone will take the extra effort to create constantly new wallets, etc.

So, in case someone can trace you to a wallet, that someone can know all your transactions (of course, only the transactions for that wallet), which is a huge potential privacy risk.

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