bitcoin's not really that anonymous. Sure, the ledger doesn't contain identities, but it's not extremely difficult for the mapping between addresses and identities to "leak" and once they do, it's anything but anonymous.
Since there are more avenues of trade available than say, with cash, laundering and other clever tactics can be used as tools to cover your tracks.
As always, the only way to keep yourself safe is through GOOD OPSEC. Bitcoin is an evolution of the currency concept, a tool for moving and representing wealth; nothing more.
that says nothing for coins mined directly, wjere there is no link to any real world identity held anywhere, just a bitcoin payment address.
Just look at the addresses the stolen bitcoins were sent to.
I was just pointing out that bitcoin is anonymous when used by someone with a brain. (I.e not Ross Ulbricht, who apparently sent money to an assassin from his personal wallet, without using a mixer.)
It's different with something like speech, where we have a rational principle that says "people can speak as a general proxy for hypothetical positions." But you can't make hypothetical purchases, and you can't represent a general population with anonymous purchases. So anonymous purchases don't have a social basis for the same protections.
People need money to speak freely (especially when they are persecuted for it), and those donations should be anonymous.
I think think of far more cases where anonymous transactions are harmful than I can where they are beneficial.
Do you think all free speech should be only with identified speakers? How would you feel if your entire spending history was in the public domain?
In most of your examples, you can easily pay with cash, which is anonymous.
I wouldn't care if my spending history were public, but that's obviously not relevant. I don't believe spending should be anonymous. I don't believe people should be allowed to make any purchase they desire without penalty. I do believe people should be able to speak without penalty, as people are better able to ignore bad words than they are bad money. Money corrupts people far more effectively and quickly than speech.
>It's not illegal per se to donate to wikileaks, but you may be put on a list somewhere.
So? You're already on a list somewhere. Are you arguing that you have a right not to be on lists, and that this has anything to do with currency?
>In most of your examples, you can easily pay with cash, which is anonymous.
No, not "easily." You have to go to a bank and sit in front of their cameras while they hand you money. That's not the same as anonymous internet transactions. And the person you are giving money to will see you hand it to them, unless you jump through some hoops. And jumping through hoops is shady when you're doing something illegal. And someone cannot steal your cash without being physically present, and thus requiring knowledge of your location and opportunity to leave a trail of evidence.
I mean, if it were so easy to pay cash, what value does bitcoin even bring to the table? Why are all these bitcoin advocates not just using cash, if they are so similar?
Look at Tor. It's never been broken by tracing back each relay, even though there are usually only 3. All the hacks were vulnerabilities in other things, like browsers or websites.
In the end the process of money laundering ends up being significantly more complicated than with "real money".
Don't go and compare Tor to BTC, just don't. They share nothing from a technical PoV.
The comparison of Tor to BTC was mainly comparing mixers to relays. Just like you need every relay to store logs if you're going to go after all of them to break the chain, the same holds true by mixers.
Exchanges will most definitely be storing logs, so that won't help much.
Comparing mixers to relays isn't valid either, with BTC the attacker will have access to the blockchain, which is basically the worst possible attack scenario for Tor.
And in any case, there isn't enough BTC transaction volume to reliably hide large amounts of BTC.