Blockchains and anonymity
I hope to establish a relationship with blockchain and privacy here.
To begin with, a blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked together and secured using cryptography. The first time the world heard about blockchain technology was with the introduction of Bitcoin, a pseudonymous cryptocurrency making the headlines for the first time as “Dark web” money.
Indeed, Bitcoin was the “official” currency of Silk Road, an underground marketplace for all sorts of illegal goods and services incorporated on the darknet. Back then the technology was new to everybody, and you could rarely find an expert that truly understood it. People often misconceived pseudo-anonymous for anonymous just because wallet addresses aren’t related to actual IDs.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
The blockchain ledger is public and fully transparent. Everyone owning a copy of the ledger can search it and trace all the transactions made by everyone on the network back to the very beginning of the cryptocurrency protocol. There’s no doubt that transparency can be a good thing, but sometimes people want to hide their transactions for various reasons.
Imagine you’re a business that receives a payment from a supplier. That supplier will be able to search the blockchain and see how much money your business has and how, when and where you spend it. They can further use this commercially sensitive information to leverage it against you, and greatly diminish your position in future negotiations.
In the “early days” of Bitcoin, the more tech-savvy users that wanted to remain anonymous on the network used all sorts of technological solutions to obfuscate the transaction information and, hopefully, make it impossible for anyone to identify them. Services like VPNs and Tor were a regular practice, but also people started using tumbling or mixing services to omit the possibility of being tracked by anyone.
However, several studies proved that all of these methods could be rendered useless through careful analysis of the blockchain by financially superior and technologically advanced agents. As time progressed, more and more people in the crypto community saw the need for simple, user-friendly services that guaranteed anonymity as a default option.
For instance, dark wallets, stealth addresses, DASH and other models were created with the intention of providing anonymous transactions to the profane cryptocurrency user. All of them have their merits, but none of them managed quite to pull it off.
Right now, the only genuinely private cryptocurrency is not Bitcoin, but Monero. The best part is that it’s open-source, secure and untraceable. It’s the closest thing to completely anonymous internet money.
Brace yourselves and get ready to unravel the dark mysteries of cryptocurrency and watch as the knight in shining armour comes to the rescue.