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0 pointsJtsummers5y ago0 comments

Ansil849 already said this, but when talking about things like this there are actually multiple related, sometimes orthogonal, factors:

Anonymity - the quality of the user being unknown

Privacy - the quality of the user's actions being unobserved

Authenticity- the quality of the user's actions being certainly the user's

Bitcoin provides pseudonymous transactions, which may approach anonymity if the user is careful. It does not provide true privacy as all transactions are public. But the purpose of the transactions is not communicated, though may be inferred if the parties are identified. If I transfer $20 in BTC to a pizza joint, you can guess that I bought a pizza, but it's just a (well-founded) guess. It provides a high degree of authenticity in that it is a hard problem (in the mathematical sense, unless your keys have been obtained by an adversary) to fake a transaction.

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matthewdgreen5y ago

Yes, I have a PhD in cryptography and designed two of the first privacy-preserving extensions to Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides pseudonymity. If no other information can be inferred about a transaction from other sources, users may be able to protect their privacy. In practice this is extremely challenging, and the information leakage this post is discussing is highly unnecessary, and a weakness of Bitcoin.

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