These are all valid points. I hadn't really thought much about this point until you all just brought it up. The reason I so quickly spout off that phrase, is that I endlessly get requests from Armory users to implement more anonymity-based features. When I say there are bigger priorities, they suggest that "anonymity" is a core benefit of Bitcoin and I should be supporting it. I'm not against anonymity, and I most certainly favor privacy, but my goal was to produce a versatile client, not one focused on any one aspect -- there are plenty of people who use it for other reasons than anonymity. However, I do like Greg's comment about "attacks" against a blind-dust-inclusion algorithm, and suggestion to maintain a clustering of already-linked addresses. That's not terribly difficult to do with the transaction history in hand, and it could increase how often the logic triggers. I suppose these hardcore SD players probably have a lot of one-satoshi outputs that could use vacuuming... On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Stephen Pair wrote: > On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Mike Hearn wrote: > >> Second thing, it's best to carefully separate "anonymity" from >> "privacy". Privacy is supposed to be a feature of the system (it says >> so in Satoshis paper) because people demand it. If I loan a tenner to >> my friend and he is able to find out what I earned last month, then >> that trade was neither anonymous nor private. In this case I want >> privacy but anonymity isn't useful. Mixing up anonymity with privacy >> is not only a public relations problem, but can lead to confusion from >> users when they, eg, try and buy Bitcoins from an exchange and are >> asked to provide ID proofs. > > > I would like to second this point...privacy is essential because the > market demands it. If Bitcoin doesn't do it well (and I would argue that > it doesn't today), then eventually a competitor to Bitcoin will do it > better and that would be the beginning of the end for Bitcoin. Debates > about whether it was or wasn't a core feature are pointless. >