If you feel the need to comment on this post, you can click the link to the following thread to reply there. For the moment, I am discouraging replies by keeping this thread locked because I am trying to not get involved in long debates. Have work to do.


Let's differentiate between anonymity and privacy.

Anonymity means that no one can know some aspect of your identity, e.g. you might decide to reveal the name of your company but never who runs that company.

Privacy means only some people know some aspect of your identity, e.g. the merchants you buy from may know your account number but otherwise not public unless revealed by one of those merchants.

Anonymity is a more secure form of privacy because there is no trust involved, because no one knows what you have not revealed to anyone.

So I can choose to trust a merchant who reveals its name and stakes its reputation on that name, without needing to know who owns that merchant. The key here is that prior bad outcomes don't follow the owner to new ventures. So history of performance of a merchant becomes paramount.

If I don't want to trust a merchant to deliver the goods, the merchant and I can agree on a 3rd party escrow agent with multisig on payment (both I and escrow agent must sign for payment to be transferred to merchant). Again no need for the escrow agent to reveal his/her true name rather the historical reputation of a pseudonym will suffice.

Ditto on contracts, arbitration agents can be chosen on contract signing.

In short, our personal identity can be orthogonal to our business performance identity.

This allows us to fail and start over again. It is very forgiving. And it keeps the government, conniving attorneys, and the Kangeroo court system out of our business.