Sounds to me like you just explained why you shouldn't want anonymity in your transaction.

There are benefits to anonymity, which arguably outweigh disadvantages.

I was just pointing out that bitcoin is anonymous when used by someone with a brain. (I.e not Ross Ulbricht, who apparently sent money to an assassin from his personal wallet, without using a mixer.)

I understand that there are benefits to anonymity, but I don't think anonymous transactions are really a priority at this time, except for people doing illegal business. I certainly don't want politicians to be able to receive anonymous funding.

It's different with something like speech, where we have a rational principle that says "people can speak as a general proxy for hypothetical positions." But you can't make hypothetical purchases, and you can't represent a general population with anonymous purchases. So anonymous purchases don't have a social basis for the same protections.

But what about when someone wants to donate to wikileaks, which supports free speech (say), but they don't want governments to know that?

People need money to speak freely (especially when they are persecuted for it), and those donations should be anonymous.

People need free speech to speak freely. Your Wikileaks example is cherry-picking: it is not illegal to donate to Wikileaks. It might be illegal to donate to a drug cartel, or somebody like ISIS. Or to that police officer who wanted to give you a ticket. Or that government agent deciding who to give a big contract to.

I think think of far more cases where anonymous transactions are harmful than I can where they are beneficial.

It's not illegal per se to donate to wikileaks, but you may be put on a list somewhere.

Do you think all free speech should be only with identified speakers? How would you feel if your entire spending history was in the public domain?

In most of your examples, you can easily pay with cash, which is anonymous.

No, I don't think all free speech should be with identity. I would anticipate that it is hard to have free speech under such conditions.

I wouldn't care if my spending history were public, but that's obviously not relevant. I don't believe spending should be anonymous. I don't believe people should be allowed to make any purchase they desire without penalty. I do believe people should be able to speak without penalty, as people are better able to ignore bad words than they are bad money. Money corrupts people far more effectively and quickly than speech.

>It's not illegal per se to donate to wikileaks, but you may be put on a list somewhere.

So? You're already on a list somewhere. Are you arguing that you have a right not to be on lists, and that this has anything to do with currency?

>In most of your examples, you can easily pay with cash, which is anonymous.

No, not "easily." You have to go to a bank and sit in front of their cameras while they hand you money. That's not the same as anonymous internet transactions. And the person you are giving money to will see you hand it to them, unless you jump through some hoops. And jumping through hoops is shady when you're doing something illegal. And someone cannot steal your cash without being physically present, and thus requiring knowledge of your location and opportunity to leave a trail of evidence.

I mean, if it were so easy to pay cash, what value does bitcoin even bring to the table? Why are all these bitcoin advocates not just using cash, if they are so similar?

If that money is ever exchanged, it'd probably be trivial for a powerful entity to figure where it went.

What if it gets sent through a mixer, then sent to an exchange, traded for an alt-coin, that's sent through its own mixer, then sent to a different exchange and traded back, then sent to another mixer? All you need is one link on the chain to not keep logs (which many mixers claim not to anyway), and you've hit a dead end.

Look at Tor. It's never been broken by tracing back each relay, even though there are usually only 3. All the hacks were vulnerabilities in other things, like browsers or websites.

Mixing large amounts is pretty damn hard, there's not enough volume to hide large transactions. Trading massive amounts of BTC to an altcoin would be even harder, concealing the movements of that altcoin would be pretty much impossible.

In the end the process of money laundering ends up being significantly more complicated than with "real money".

Don't go and compare Tor to BTC, just don't. They share nothing from a technical PoV.

I'm not so sure about what you say about large mixing. https://bitmixer.io/faqs.html claims to have 2000 btc available, around $500,000. I argued that exchanges function as a mixer of sorts, and they're going to have a lot more btc lying around.

The comparison of Tor to BTC was mainly comparing mixers to relays. Just like you need every relay to store logs if you're going to go after all of them to break the chain, the same holds true by mixers.

2000BTC isn't very much at all, especially since the mixer having 2000BTC doesn't mean they can securely mix 2000BTC.

Exchanges will most definitely be storing logs, so that won't help much.

Comparing mixers to relays isn't valid either, with BTC the attacker will have access to the blockchain, which is basically the worst possible attack scenario for Tor.

And in any case, there isn't enough BTC transaction volume to reliably hide large amounts of BTC.