First, thank you for raising this point again. It has been in the past and deserve to be restated : bitcoin is not about anonymousity. If something, it is more about traceability than anything else. With a trusted third-party, some money laundering scheme become possible but they are not that different than regular money laundering operations.
What bitcoin is about, however, is about the feasibility to have pseudonymous entities that can't be traced to real persons, yet trade online commodities and services. Take lulzsec fot instance : they accepted BTC donations and could spend them to buy web hosting, to make donations to various associations, or to simply buy services from anyone accepting bitcoins.
Right now, the anonymity is lost as soon as BTC is converted into a regular currency, but as long as it stays in the BTC network, the account is nothing more than a number (and an IP if you don't use a anonymisation network).
You could have pseudonymous software developers, writing code in exchange of hosting of gfx works, all of that happening in the gray legal area of international services exchanges. Today there are no way of creating a small international dematerialized company, which is a shame and a failure of international cooperation. Bitcoin could be a tool to address just that.
Comments
First, thank you for raising this point again. It has been in the past and deserve to be restated : bitcoin is not about anonymousity. If something, it is more about traceability than anything else. With a trusted third-party, some money laundering scheme become possible but they are not that different than regular money laundering operations.
What bitcoin is about, however, is about the feasibility to have pseudonymous entities that can't be traced to real persons, yet trade online commodities and services. Take lulzsec fot instance : they accepted BTC donations and could spend them to buy web hosting, to make donations to various associations, or to simply buy services from anyone accepting bitcoins.
Right now, the anonymity is lost as soon as BTC is converted into a regular currency, but as long as it stays in the BTC network, the account is nothing more than a number (and an IP if you don't use a anonymisation network).
You could have pseudonymous software developers, writing code in exchange of hosting of gfx works, all of that happening in the gray legal area of international services exchanges. Today there are no way of creating a small international dematerialized company, which is a shame and a failure of international cooperation. Bitcoin could be a tool to address just that.