It doesn't matter whether most people's use cases are "truly" anonymous or not, because not everyone who makes an anonymous payment is the kingpin of a human trafficking ring who will actually have large amounts of resources brought to bear on them.
People use burner phones to get drugs for nights out. Theoretically none of this is really anonymous, you're pinging cell towers, you're probably on CCTV, etc etc. But realistically that doesn't matter and it works as a system.
Even something like Monero which might have claim to be truly untraceable really isn't because you're on like, an Intel ME machine and the NSA likely has backdoors in the Linux kernel and ... blah blah blah ...
But it's good enough.
Imagine if Hacker News required ID-verified real name front and center on every post. Throwaway accounts are impossible. They were never perfect anyway, but now they don't exist.
The discourse would change. Perhaps an individual might see it as being better, or worse, but it'd definitely be different.
The traditional banking system is that ID-verified world. Cryptocurrencies are the release valve.
People use burner phones to get drugs for nights out. Theoretically none of this is really anonymous, you're pinging cell towers, you're probably on CCTV, etc etc. But realistically that doesn't matter and it works as a system.
Even something like Monero which might have claim to be truly untraceable really isn't because you're on like, an Intel ME machine and the NSA likely has backdoors in the Linux kernel and ... blah blah blah ...
But it's good enough.
Imagine if Hacker News required ID-verified real name front and center on every post. Throwaway accounts are impossible. They were never perfect anyway, but now they don't exist.
The discourse would change. Perhaps an individual might see it as being better, or worse, but it'd definitely be different.
The traditional banking system is that ID-verified world. Cryptocurrencies are the release valve.
FWIW I think Tether is bollocks.