Hear, hear!

I absolutely agree. It feels like an elaborate thought experiment carried out for the sake of experiment, and artificially handicapped by many limitations to the boot. I'm surprised a more sane thing wasn't proposed at the time.

In fact once someone has one of your Bitcoin addresses, they'll be able to see and track all transactions involving that address, including "shuffling" into new addresses. One can even construct a whole graph of transactions starting from some known bitcoin address since the chains of transactions are absolutely transparent for everyone. I guess it's a dream come true for the intelligence and data mining agencies.

And yes, the only way to opt out of that transparency is to use the laundry and mixing services - the chain of transactions ends once you put your sum into the service and retrieve them back - since you (most probably) will get other people's coins. Just be careful not to put too much since you may get back your own coins. Also, such mixing service may not be free.

This article discusses transparency and anonymity issues well:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

So the article says 1MW, the author's video shows 1MW, and the youtube page says "it fires an intense 1 MW blast of invisible infrared 1064nm light". And yet a single anonymous comment saying 1kW is more trustworthy.

I wish I had the mod points to vote for that comment.

Check his other comments and submissions, he appears to be on a mission.

How's that "News for nerds"? We have many more outfits that are more suited for political news like this. I'm tired of all this recent creep of political garbage over /.

I'm wondering the same...

Yes, I never understood why so many pay attention to Joel's inflammatory rants.

I don't even want to start on his company's product (Fogbugz). Seriously, ASP/VBScript translated to PHP? And then inventing a new programming language just for a web app with ability to output in several other languages? Ugh.