The IRS has stated that recently they can track down people who are making a profit of Bitcoin without claiming it on their tax return. I wonder if the Core Engineers will start to look at ways to keep Bitcoin anonymous from prying eyes of the IRS and other Governments?
What are your thoughts?
Thanks,
I'm sure that making bitcoin more private is probably on the Core dev team agenda, but I doubt that is something that has a high priority level. Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous, since your identity is not tied to your wallet or address, but of course we all know that everything is public in the blockchain, so by the time someone knows you are the owner of an address, they can track down every transaction you make. They won't know what they are, unless they also manage "to ID" the other addresses, but they can see how much you have there, and how much you have been spending.
You can of course keep changing addresses, and do your best not to get identified by a particular address, so I'm not really worried with this. As far as the IRS goes, don't forget that regulation is important for bitcoin, in order for it to become legit and get more adoption. I have no plans in evading taxes, and I don't think anyone should do that.
Anonymity is important, but I hope the Core team is focused on the scalability issues, and in developing off-chain solutions like the lightning network. That is the very important update that we are all waiting. Anyway since segwit provides many off-chain solutions, I'm sure that it will be easy to increase the privacy of bitcoin transactions.