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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, only a few people have come to this realization:

   1. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a corporation without money
   2. So far it's been impossible to receive money online anonymously

Therefore:

   3. Corporations can't be anonymous

Bitcoin finally gets rid of this barrier and makes anonymous corporations possible (whether autonomous or human-operated)

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Anonymity is not really a feature of Bitcoin, and in fact the design of Bitcoin makes anonymity difficult.

People keep saying this, but it's just not true.

Use a tumbler. Done.

No, not done:

(1) You need to hope and pray that your mixing service does not just run off with your money

(2) You need to be careful not to withdraw your money from the mixing service "too quickly" or else you will de-anonymize yourself

Here is a paper that casts serious doubt on at least one mixing service, based on a simple (by the authors' own admission) approach to de-anonymizing Bitcoin:

https://www.wi.uni-muenster.de/sites/default/files/public/de...

All this ignores the fact that the security model of Bitcoin mixing services is even less well-developed than the security model of Bitcoin itself (incredibly, such things are possible).

Thank you for the paper. But did you read it? Bitcoin Fog works, and the paper goes into detail about why it works.

In the Silk Road investigation, the investigators basically threw up their hands and said "don't bother trying to analyze the transaction graph." So there's some evidence that tumblers are effective in practice.

I do not think the takeaway is that Bitcoin Fog works; rather, it is that Bitcoin Fog protects you from the specific strategy used by the authors of the paper. Another approach might work against Bitcoin Fog.

"In the Silk Road investigation, the investigators basically threw up their hands and said "don't bother trying to analyze the transaction graph." So apparently tumblers are effective in practice."

Do you have a citation about mixing services specifically thwarting investigators? Maybe the investigators felt that Bitcoin itself was too much to deal with. It would not be the first time a law enforcement agency has pointed to a system with little-to-no security and claimed that they cannot attack it.

Do you have an email I could reach you at?

Sure, but is there a less public way for me to give it to you?

You can email me... I'll just delete this comment after you do. My email is sillysaurus2 at gmail.

No, but pseudonymity, with no appreciable tie to a 'real name', is, and therefore if you can pay for your business expenses with Bitcoin and find some way of extracting the value without providing a name (i.e. buying commodities to dead-drops, via silk road, etc), you can run a corporation entirely pseudonymously.

You are not attaching any form of ID to the transactions. Bitcoin is anonymous.

The fact that the NSA can track you down by various means is a whole different thing. And by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's deterministic and it doesn't lose information, so theoretically everything could be traced back to its origin.

"You are not attaching any form of ID to the transactions. Bitcoin is anonymous."

That is kind of like saying, "StackOverflow is anonymous. You do not attach any form of ID to your questions!" Of course, that worked out pretty badly for a certain high-profile Bitcoin user recently (yes, he leaked his real name at one point; however, he had also used his pseudonym in many other places, which was part of the problem):

https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a

"by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's deterministic"

Hardly, in fact, all the evidence points to a probabilistic universe; by extension, probabilistic approaches to anonymity might be possible. It just so happens that in the context of electronic payments, that is entirely possible, and for more than 25 years cryptographers have been studying such things (and there is a pile of published research). Yes, you can even have an electronic payments system that protects your privacy from the NSA.

> yes, he leaked his real name at one point

So either he attached his ID, or he was traced by other means. Stackoverflow can be anonymous. It doesn't require an ID verification. But you can put your real name if you want to, nothing is stopping you.

And again, by your logic you won't be able to give me an example of something that is anonymous: Whatever you say, I will say that the NSA planted a cam in your home. BOOM! Not anonymous anymore.

> Hardly, in fact, all the evidence points to a probabilistic universe

Not a physicist, but AFAIK that's the old interpretation of quantum mechanics, disproved by some cheap but crazy experiments.

>And by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's deterministic and it doesn't lose information, so theoretically everything could be traced back to its origin.

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

If a process is irreversible it means information was lost. And from the article, "All complex natural processes are irreversible".

Nowhere in there it says that information was lost. It just says that to reverse the process it requires introducing energy to the system and that the impossibility resides in that the changes occurred in an "not easily predictable". So it's a practical impossibility, not theoretical.

The Universe doesn't lose information. The one thing that made physicists believe for a moment that it did, was something about blackholes, but it was then proven to be wrong.

I think there are enough legal structures in various jurisdictions that make creating an anonymous corporation somewhat easy. http://www.economist.com/node/21563286 is a pretty good article on it. The book "Treasure Islands" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OA6420/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...) is a pretty good read about offshore banking/tax havens and the price put on secrecy.

I don't believe the OP is suggesting the company doesn't make money, rather there's no specific group of people who partake in the profits.

Why does the money received need to be anonymous?

Presumably to avoid prosecution for tax evasion.

I think it would be more interesting to imagine that such a company could theoretically pay its taxes. If such an entity is to be trusted and utilized by the majority, having it "play by the rules" to some extent could be valuable.

There is no moral value whatsoever in playing by politically-controlled rules. To libertarians your statement sounds very anti-libertarian and to religious people, your statement sounds like a blasphemous heresy.

> To libertarians your statement sounds very anti-libertarian

And to reasonable people, it sounds reasonable.

Libertarians and religious people come to the same conclusion by entirely different routes: Calling people to obedience to any other laws than the ones of the Creator, the original lawmaker, amounts to pronouncing a blasphemous heresy. Anybody doing that will deservedly burn in hell.

> Why does the money received need to be anonymous?

Well, since I was talking about an "anonymous corporation" in my comment, it would be kind of necessary for it to receive money anonymously.

I agree OP is talking about something slightly different.

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