Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.

“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”

  • The Cooking SenpaiEnglish
    14•1 year ago

    There should be more education on the difference between “privacy being available if you look for it” VS “privacy being ensured since the beginning and forever no matter what”

    Spoiler: the last one does not exists

    • @[email protected]English
      7•1 year ago

      Monero comes the closest, but there is a possibility that ring signatures could be broken in the future for sure.

      • FaceDeer
        -1•1 year ago

        Ethereum supports anonymized tokens and rollups too, if you choose to use them.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          That’s the difference though. On Ethereum you have to choose to use them. On Monero it’s private by default. And that’s the way it ought to be.

          • FaceDeer
            0•1 year ago

            If you’re using the anonymized tokens then your transactions are private by default.

            Anonymization requires a bunch of computational overhead which means that anonymized transactions cost more to execute, all else being equal. So a blockchain where you can choose whether you’re using anonymization or not depending on your particular needs is better than one where it’s forced on every transaction.

            Bear in mind, Ethereum is a platform. It has many different tokens with different properties running on that platform, some of which are as anonymous as Monero. Use the ones with the properties you need.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•1 year ago

              Oh, I see what you mean now. I have heard of privacy projects that are anonymous sometimes and not anonymous at other times like Zcash and was under the impression that is kind of what you meant.

              • FaceDeer
                0•1 year ago

                Those sorts of things exist on Ethereum too. There are also “mixers”, like Tornado Cash, that can anonymize a particular transaction using a normally non-anonymized token. The Ethereum philosophy is to provide a broad range of tools that can interoperate with each other, allowing people to use whichever ones suit their specific need.

    • proleEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Spoiler: the last one does not exists

      Maybe technically… But we’ve come up with some pretty ridiculous cryptography schemes that would take billions of years to crack.

      • The Cooking SenpaiEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        You would be surprised in finding out that the majority of blockchains out there aren’t Quantum resistant, tho (elliptic curves being the reason mainly but I am not an expert)