How the Bitcoin protocol actually works. How anonymous is Bitcoin?

  

  Bubbles are irresistible by nature, they are sucking you up with the rest of the crowd in the parabolic move. When everybody is getting rich literally overnight, how can you stay away? Now we have The One for the Meme generation.

  Not only the FED is watching the important levels in Gold and Bitcoin, Winklevoss twins are pumping hard Bitcoin today on the reddit fighting the FED. They came out with the solid target price of $40,000, so before at least $39,999 there is nothing to worry about. 

  We warned about the Central Banks Launching Worldwide Coordinated Attack On Bitcoin as we see it and now it is time to dig into Bitcoin fundamentals and technical architecture - what will be left from this brilliant idea after The Bubble Crash.

  Michael Nielsen describes it with very good technical detail level and you can find his full work on the link, we will provide here only the extract on the one of the most important value propositions of Bitcoin - its anonymity. Brian Hanley has published very interesting research paper on Bitcoin, which we would like to share today as well. And Francois R. Velde presents the Bitcoin Primer with the view from Chicago FED. 

Brian P. Hanley: The False Premises and Promises of Bitcoin.

"[bitcoin is]...a very clever practical joke by someone who is having enormous fun exposing in the most sophisticated way imaginable the naivety of clever mathematicians, economists and/or rich speculators. ... or ... The cleverest con trick ever conceived, and probably one of the most rewarding."

Chicago FED Letter - Bitcoin: A Primer

"The term “mining” may lead one to think that bitcoin is not fiduciary. It is true that real resources (computing hardware and energy) are expended in creating bitcoins. Since entry to min- ing is free, the value of these resources will be the market value of bitcoins pro- duced (whose number per day does not depend on the size of the network). But once created, the bitcoin has no value other than in exchange, contrary to a gold coin."

Central Banks Launching Worldwide Coordinated Attack On Bitcoin

  Technical analysis for Bitcoin is basically meaningless with so much noise in the print, but the chart below from TheArmoTrader tells the story better than thousand words. After all recent events described below we are issuing our Warning and the line in the sand is $800 for Bitcoin now. With coordinated attack Bitcoin can be pushed below it, everything is prepared for it now. We do not have any inside, but has been in the Gold market and observed its manipulation enough to see what is coming. If somebody is interested now to Kill the Bitcoin brilliant idea hijacked by speculators with  Crashing The Bubble - it is time. Whether there are enough interested parties to do so  you have to decide for yourself. Will it happen now? We will see very soon. The most unfortunate thing is that some influential people are leading the uninformed "freedom fighters" towards just one more slaughterhouse now.

  Central Banks are getting all together now to celebrate Federal Reserve 100 Year Anniversary. If somebody thought that Bitcoin with other "listed" 42 Crypto-Currencies can challenge the banksters for real, please think twice and take at least the profit! We need more smart people with capital to join the real values when Gold and Silver will be shining again after Special Op "Gold 2.0" to distract 99% from Gold will be over. FED is still silent, but crackdown on Bitcoin is already in place. Now Central Banks of Australia and New Zealand have issued Bitcoin warning. All these actions are coordinated, as you can see now. Pump it Up and Crash it hard - how many will be left to support the brilliant idea? We will note one more time very important coincidence: according to the reports JPMorgan is Net Long Gold now. Crashing Bitcoin will send Gold much higher, maybe JPMorgan knows something the others don't?"

Michael Nielsen:

How the Bitcoin protocol actually works

"How anonymous is Bitcoin? Many people claim that Bitcoin can be used anonymously. This claim has led to the formation of marketplaces such as Silk Road (and various successors), which specialize in illegal goods. However, the claim that Bitcoin is anonymous is a myth. The block chain is public, meaning that it’s possible for anyone to see every Bitcoin transaction ever. Although Bitcoin addresses aren’t immediately associated to real-world identities, computer scientists have done a great deal of work figuring out how to de-anonymize “anonymous” social networks. The block chain is a marvellous target for these techniques. I will be extremely surprised if the great majority of Bitcoin users are not identified with relatively high confidence and ease in the near future. The confidence won’t be high enough to achieve convictions, but will be high enough to identify likely targets. Furthermore, identification will be retrospective, meaning that someone who bought drugs on Silk Road in 2011 will still be identifiable on the basis of the block chain in, say, 2020. These de-anonymization techniques are well known to computer scientists, and, one presumes, therefore to the NSA. I would not be at all surprised if the NSA and other agencies have already de-anonymized many users. It is, in fact, ironic that Bitcoin is often touted as anonymous. It’s not. Bitcoin is, instead, perhaps the most open and transparent financial instrument the world has ever seen."