They aren't anonymous, raising enormous privacy issues. Because they aren't anonymous, and are completely trackable, it means bitcoin dollars won't be fungible, either, which raises another giant set of issues. Not to mention that it puts an end to all meaningful debt, which would require the complete disassembly of all human economies, present and future, as there has never been a debtless economy. And of course there's the minor issue of how to buy food when the power goes out. This is a dead end, if not an outright scam.
Guaranteed EBay takes it's cut of the transaction in real currency. This is fundamentally no different than trading baseball cards.
you can exchange bitcoin in person from what I remember. Many individuals act as exchangers for a small profit. There is a map somewhere of exchangers. There should be some one in your area, anyone can be an exchanger. Though plentiful, it is very unprofessional. --Possibly dangerous? In this case your exposure is limited to meeting an "exchanger" Again this is from at least a year ago. No paper trail, just your face. A face that may get kicked in for cash.
Bitcoin comes with the most complete paper trail ever - every single transaction for every single BTC is recorded and shared.
Why did those two guys go up on that Startup TV show and admit that a french /japanese / american "investor" owns most Bitcoins.. and that the owner may have legal issues... http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-st...eed:+twistvid+(This+Week+in+Startups+-+Video) Go to minute 18:00
I'm not sure, maybe they share the info, I don't see why they would do this. But thats ok. The trail only exists if you have your bit coin account connected to you. You can buy bits from a trusted vendor, pay cash for it, they will transfer to your account I guess. There would be no need to have your account connected to you or your finances as all buying and selling can be done through a vendor. I've never tried this, but i saw that there are lot of vendors out there. It seems like bit coins focuses on having vendors that create liquidity to cash. A list of vendors exists and they make it easy and profitable to be a vendor. In this case the transactions may be connected to your account but the account does not need to be connected to you. Imagine if you sell a T.V through bit coins. You get bit coins in your account, and go to a vendor to have it exchanged for cash. Since your account has no connection to you (i dought they ask for ID to open an account?), there is no connection to your sale. This can be used by many to save on taxes, In turn, this makes the future of bitcoins slightly questionable. Since this is can be used anonymusly if set up right. Many will start to take advantage of that fact. This could possibly cause a conflict with authorities down the line. I'm not a lawyer, I dont know if they could freeze accounts or maybe the whole system. I heard that Linden doallars from Second life was being used this way? (but it may have a paper trail when you fund your Second life account) Here you can fund in cash through a vendor. So the only connection that remains is from an annoymus account a vendor. The weekness in the link is when you meet the vendor. There would be a brief face to face conctact. Keep in mind I don't know if it works. I have never had need to use it so I dont have an account. Just was intrested in the idea a long time ago. Of cource, if ID is needed then your account is connected to you.
I understand that an additional perk is the account is anonymised frequently. So, if you have 2 transactions separated in time by, say, 2 hours, there is now way to see if they were committed from the same account. In other words, the public identity of an account changes very frequently and only the account owner who keeps a log of past transactions should be able to tell if 2 trasnsactions are from his or her account.
They work on a different model than traditional banking. Bankers keep exact record of ownership but keep the transcations as private as possible. Bitcoin keep the ownership secret but every transaction is public by design. The way a stransaction happens is the info about this transation is sent to all computers running Bitcoin software worldwide. The transaction is "committed" when a sufficient number of Bitcoin nodes acnowledged they recieved info about the transaction. Because every transaction is broadcast freely to everyone, better connected nodes, such as "exchanges", would potentially have data on every single transaction. Because everyone can have this data if they just keep their computer online 24x7, there is no good reason not to share this data.
Except this is supposed to be a "currency". In which case ownership is 100% not secret - taxing authorities will know who paid your salary, and how, for example - which means your entire transaction history is available to *everyone*. Not to mention any BTC you spend that don't derive from your reported income are immediately visible to authorities. So now you have a specific "dollar bill" that can be "turned off" - which means it won't be like every other BTC in circulation because of it's provenance - which means every single BTC will have a different real-worked path-dependent value. This will never work, unless people are willing to give up privacy of financial transactions *completely*. No possible problems there.