Aella
Inactive Cam Model
CallMeWilliam said:Wrong!Aella said:Actually I'm pretty sure one can't 'ban' someone from bitcoin. It's not regulated by any one central authority, and exchanges are almost entirely anonymous. Child pornography and bestiality probably ARE purchased and sold in bitcoin, and as it currently stands there is no way to stop it.
I support bitcoin anyway, though, because, though it is free from law, it's also free from government. Ideally, once it gains stability, there will be no regulation by an outside authority, there will be easier methods of tax reduction, and the market will be entirely self-regulating. A libertarian paradise, or at least as close to one as we're gonna get, here. Nobody can track transactions, so nobody could look at your records and try to take your money. There will be no artificial inflation or money saturation. There will be no import or export taxes. Everything will be at the whim of the consumer. Possibly even no minimum wage laws (though our government would probably fuck that over).
It's an unlikely future, but I want it so much I'm gonna support it anyway.
Also this paper http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir on the "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph" shows us that by analysing the Bitcoin Transaction graph (by default all transactions are logged the proverbial paper trail see http://blockchain.info/) you could figure out who is making the transactions.The Bitcoin Wiki for Anonymity isn't very reassuring, starting off admitting that "while the Bitcoin technology can support strong anonymity, the current implementation is usually not very anonymous."
They actually used this technique to search for Satoshi Nakamoto (person or group of people who designed and created the original Bitcoin software). They concluded that a handful of massive transactions made in November 2010, in which large amounts of Bitcoins were stashed away in several accounts that have yet to make another outgoing transaction were in fact by this person/persons. While it is not 100% Dorit and Adi say that if any of the Bitcoins make another transaction they would be able to identify who made them.
So the only way to be anonymous is not to have any transactions. Which defeats the purpose of any currency.
That's why I said 'mostly.' If I understand correctly, all transactions give you an ID 'number' that can't be traced back to you - but it's possible to see all transactions made by this anonymous number, and if you watch long enough, eventually you might have enough info to figure it out.
There ARE ways of changing your ID number (correct me if I'm wrong on this), though, so people who are very dedicated to privacy shouldn't find that to be much of an issue.