Quote from: philipma1957 on January 16, 2023, 09:58:26 PM

Quote from: dgoon on January 16, 2023, 06:57:43 PM

I recently began diving into the Mimble Wimble protocol. I found the white paper and general work around it to be amazing. It brings me to question the existence of utxos and addresses in Bitcoin. Coins like monero and mimble wimble derivatives function today with no on-chain addresses, and I am curious as to why addresses exist on the bitcoin blockchain. My understanding is that you can get rid of addresses and have people sign utxo's directly with ECC. It seems that addresses sorta function like accounts in eth and utxos's function for transactions in mimble wimble. Bitcoin seems to have both utxos and addresses and has some of the downsides of both approaches. Addresses in bitcoin lead to address reuse which is bad for privacy. Address reuse is prevalent today also. I thought all last night about the issue and I could not come up with a fundamental downside to Bitcoin ditching addresses and just going utxo only. I also thought about bitcoin going the opposite direction and just using addresses as accounts and getting rid of utxo's, sorta like eth. I know bitcoin would unlikely adopt these things due to coordination issues. I would love to learn more about these technical questions. Any links to further readings or thoughts on the issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time!

because i can go private or not private .

because i can easily and simply run a legal taxable business with repeatable traceable addresses.

Some want to be tracked and traced when they make money.

and if you want to hide btc and be private its possible. difficult but possible.

Look up my public often repeated 1J address in my profile it goes back in time for years. 2013 and hundreds of traceable transactions .

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=64507

1Jd

I am glad that you value the transparency offered by Bitcoin, this is a solid reason for how Bitcoin currently is!