Quote from: gmaxwell on November 15, 2013, 07:46:23 AM

Quote from: BitThink on November 15, 2013, 07:01:16 AM

For those who wants complete anonymity, they can go for some altcoins supporting it. In my opinion, BTC is supposed to be used by everyone and everywhere as mainstream currency. So please stop doing things like this to push the majority away just for the sake of niche market.

I can't seem to find the link to your bank account records, mind posting them for us?

Luke is pretty much the last person you'd expect to give a crap about underground uses. But privacy is _not_ only a consideration for them, or even primarily for them: dope dealersor whatever you want your bogeyman to becan buy their way to privacy even in a system which is very non-private.

Financial privacy is an essential element to fungibility in Bitcoin: if you can meaningfully distinguish one coin from another, then their fungibility is weak. If our fungibility is too weak in practice, then we cannot be decentralized: if someone important announces a list of stolen coins they won't accept coins derived from, you must carefully check coins you accept against that list and return the ones that fail. Everyone gets stuck checking blacklists issued by various authorities because in that world we'd all not like to get stuck with bad coins. This adds friction and transactional costs and makes Bitcoin less valuable as a money.

Financial privacy is an essential criteria for the efficient operation of a free market: if you run a business, you cannot effectively set prices if your suppliers and customers can see all your transactions against your will. You cannot compete effectively if your competition is tracking your sales. Individually your informational leverage is lost in your private dealings if you don't have privacy over your accounts: if you pay your landlord in Bitcoin without enough privacy in place, your landlord will see when you've received a pay raise and can hit you up for more rent.

Financial privacy is essential for personal safety: if thieves can see your spending, income, and holdings, they can use that information to target and exploit you. Without privacy malicious parties have more ability to steal your identity, snatch your large purchases off your doorstep, or impersonate businesses you transact with towards you... they can tell exactly how much to try to scam you for.

Financial privacy is essential for human dignity: no one wants the snotty barista at the coffee shop or their nosy neighbors commenting on their income or spending habits. No one wants their baby-crazy in-laws asking why they're buying contraception (or sex toys). Your employer has no business what church you donate to. Only in a perfectly enlightened discrimination free world where no one has undue authority over anyone else could we retain our dignity and make our lawful transactions freely without self-censorship if we don't have privacy.

Most importantly, financial privacy isn't incompatible with things like law enforcement or transparency. You can always keep records, be ordered (or volunteer) to provide them to whomever, have judges hold against your interest when you can't produce records (as is the case today). None of this requires _globally_ visible public records.

Globally visible public records in finance are completely unheard-of. They are undesirable and arguably intolerable. The Bitcoin whitepaper made a promise of how we could get around the visibility of the ledger with pseudonymous addresses, but the ecosystem has broken that promise in a bunch of places and we ought to fix it. Bitcoin could have coded your name or IP address into every transaction. It didn't. The whitepaper even has a section on privacy. It's incorrect to say that Bitcoin isn't focused on privacy. Sufficient privacy is an essential prerequisite for a viable digital currency.

So, again, I asklet's see your bank records; I'm sure there is an export to CSV. Mtgox transaction dumps? Stock trading accounts. Let's see youeven just youpost all this before you presume to say that you think that's what the public wants forced on everyone.

No one asks you to make your btc addresses public. You can keep it as secret as you will. You can always choose to generate one-time receiving address if you want. But is there any reason to stop others to use one address as their public address if they think they don't mind?

Bank records are actually open to banks and authorities. So if there's some need, allowed by the law, they can do the investigation. But it does not mean I have to make it open to you. It is a controlled anonymity. My information is a secret to the public, but can be investigated by the authority based on the law.

Complete anonymity, however, makes laundering money unable to be detected. Then the authority has no other choices but to suppress it. BTC will not dead, I believe, even under suppression, but it will stay where it is and never becomes mainstream in that situation.