2019-2-2 22:53 |
Bitcoin (BTC), the most popular digital currency in the market has been always accused of being anonymous and that is used by criminals.
This is due to the fact that the coin was used for individuals at the Silk Road, a marketplace that operated on the dark web and that allowed individuals to purchase and sell illegal goods and services.
People now believe that Bitcoin is anonymous and it cannot be tracked. Nevertheless, Andreas Antonopoulos the author of the famous book Mastering Bitcoin said that the largest cryptocurrency is not anonymous, but it is just pseudo-anonymous.
During a Q&A session, Antonopoulos commented about it:
“So a lot of people think Bitcoin is anonymous. It is not anonymous, it is loosely pseudo-anonymous, which means that if you expand an enormous amount of effort on operational security and you do it very carefully and very well you may retain anonymity for a limited period of time that doesn’t sound like a good thing.”
Andreas explained that anonymity of money transactions is a very important and also a sensitive topic to discuss. He went on saying that peer-to-peer anonymous transactions existed for around 5,000 years. Additionally, he mentioned that cash was always completely anonymous, fungible, unforgeable and also self-verifying.
He explained that Bitcoin needs to be much stronger in terms of confidentiality and privacy. Users’ data and information must be protected as other coins are currently doing. Monero (XMR), for example, hides the funds transacted and the individuals that will receive these transactions.
Antonopoulos said that it is one of the biggest priority to implement bulletproof and taproot confidential transactions. He explained that if they are able to implement this properly on the base layer, they may be able to do it even better and stronger on layer two.
Litecoin (LTC), a cryptocurrency that is linked to Bitcoin, will be implementing confidential transactions throughout 2019. The information was released by Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin a few days ago on Twitter. He mentioned that fungibility is one of the things that is lacking in the crypto space and to cryptocurrencies in general.
Bitcoin is currently being traded around $3,450 and it has a market capitalization of $60.45 billion.
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