Oh, blast it all! They've learned that my agent 1PvJ8Ncwk9KQjGEDti8uBFpDR1gLgZ8QYn gave 0.92 BTC to 1Nhaw787YjYMjGCzCc9H6jsrxiWFCGzJfK! Now it's only hours until our whole operation is unraveled!
This is where a study by the Feds (I think?) comes in. They found that they were generally able to link accounts as belonging to the same person, based on transaction patterns and flow of money between the multiple accounts the holder owns.
You can make it more difficult to link your accounts together by never transferring funds between your different accounts, but then how do you fund your accounts? It just gets more and more complicated.
I don't really think Bitcoin will bring an end to "Follow the money".
That study was by some Israeli CS students, not the feds. It's methodology was severely messed up. It got absolutely destroyed by this peer review. https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921
Not really. You can create new 'names', i.e. your wallet. But they start off empty. So how do you get the actual money (bitcoins) into the new wallet? You need to transfer the money from your old wallet/name to the new one. And that is publically logged. This means you can always follow the money.
The way to get around this is to generate many wallets and move things around a lot. However it's still money moving within a subset of bitcoin wallets, so potentially trackable still (Google is able to detect 'link farms', so the police might be able to detect 'mixing farms')
It's anonymous in the sense that you can create a different identity ID, but as soon as that ID is correlated to Domino's transaction # for that transaction, or any other slip of personally-identifying info, then you're no longer anonymous.
It's worse than That as you need to fund any new ID from another act. You can mine bitcoins and send them to a new act but the ip's used to generate those bitcoins are public.
Really for most mid sized transactions cash if far better, and dominos accepts cash unlike say amazon.com.
> You can mine bitcoins and send them to a new act but the ip's used to generate those bitcoins are public.
What? There seems to be lots of misinformation here. Please prove your point. There is no need to publish your IP when you mine. Most people mine in pools, and I guess the mining pool announces the block. But you can announce it through Tor, or you can solo-mine through tor.
