Comment by prewett
16 hours ago
Except that, as far as I understand, crypto is only anonymous to the extent that getting a debit card under a fake name is anonymous. If someone is able to tie your wallet to you then all your transactions are immediately tied to you. Contrast that with cash: if someone figured out you made one transaction, it does not affect knowledge about other transactions.
So crypto is more like user-unknown rather than anonymous. I expect that normally these are about equivalent, but if you run into edge cases the difference could be catastrophic.
Monero actually does mitigate this, when you send money it creates a one time address (https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/stealthaddre...), therefore payments cannot be traced to your wallet. When receiving money it's recommended you use different sub addresses (https://docs.getmonero.org/public-address/) for different purposes, so you can receive money from multiple places that cannot be correlated with each other. For someone to view incoming transactions for your wallet they'd need your private view key, to view outgoing transactions they'd need your private spend key, both of which are private .
You can still choose to generate a proof of transaction to give to someone, which proves that you did make one specific transaction.
Monero is genuinely a really interesting, and frankly ideal as far as I can tell for my purposes, cryptocurrency. It's a shame it's associated with crime because it solves all of my issues with spending digital currency from a privacy and practicality perspective.