Quote from: Jherek on August 22, 2014, 09:54:57 AM

Quote from: Subtuppel on August 21, 2014, 10:14:22 PM

Quote from: kenji on August 21, 2014, 10:02:23 PM

it is far better to invest in anoncoins.
invest in a pos coin with no anon now is very risky but it is better you make your own decision

Funny, there is not a single anon coin that did not take as much or even more of a beating than BC recently...
The whole anon thing was a nice hype but people start to realize that none of them is even close to get it working _properly_, regardless of what they announced.

In terms of real world use all the anon coins are 100% undetectable in comparison to BC though.

Also, no one ever could explain to me, what sense all this anonymizing has. I mean only few guys who really might need it are silkroad or cp dealers or guys doing big ammounts of money laundry. Normal people are anon enough with any cryptocoin since the pseudo-anonymity of cryptos requires a certain amount of investigation into the transactions to map the money to a certain person. And those that are criminal and want to cloak in cryptos can still do it quite easily by just transfering their money over 2-3 currencies using different addresses/exchange accounts. No one really needs anoncoins for that.

This.

The supposedly 'legitimate' description of using anon functions is often made via analogy with a credit card online purchase. The argument is that although I might not be doing anything illegal in terms of my purchase, I might not want my sketchy next door neighbor to know that I just bought $75K in gold bullion, which should be delivered in a couple days. Wink

Although I appreciate this issue in a real-world sense (I'd rather my neighbors all thought I was broke as well) it is practically irrelevant in almost every instance in crypto. As long as my neighbor is unaware of what my dynamic IP is at the time of the purchase, and is unaware of my ownership of the PK for a particular address used for the purchase... how are they going to know enough of the transaction to matter. Now if you're trying to hide the transaction from the government - that's another matter entirely.

Of course, this also begs the question... have you truly taken all of the steps necessary to hide all of your assets/activities and your digital 'footprint' adequately to even achieve this. My guess would be that (just as was the case in SilkRoad) that the people that are most interested in anonymous transactions aren't even using anonymizers and/or proxies for their regular surfing activities (especially on their phones). In fact they probably have facebook/twitter pages they update daily, and online bill-pay services or app subscriptions that are tied to multiple devices, many of which may even be non-defeatable by the end user. So in reality they have almost no privacy at all - and just hiding the fact that they paid X amount to Y party on a particular date, does practically nothing to hide their activity... especially from anyone with the power of warrant-less searches at their disposal. Wink

In the end, if you want a truly anonymous transaction that is known only to yourself and the recipient of the funds... you definitely cannot perform this transaction via any electronic means. Period. Such transactions are only safe performed in secret, face-to-face, for cash or untraceable property (and even then only up to a point... as you had to travel there via some method, and were undoubtedly on 40 or so CCTV cameras going to and from the meeting).

And if you have an open BT, WiFi, or cellular device on you at the time... then you can just about write the whole thing off all together.