Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
>> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed.
> How does it matter if it's open-source?
OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
Open-source means independent audit is possible, and the developers can't be coerced in the dark to add backdoors. This is in theory of course. In reality, it just makes it much less probable.
Yeah well as long as the people allow you the internet. Without us all financing the internet, the anarchists using it for anonymous banking might find themselves a bit naked... I find it horribly suspicious crypto, depending on public electricity grids and state-funded internet infrastructure, is being sold as an anti control measure when really, it sounds a lot like a cash grab and a criminal money laundering system.
Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
>How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
They are called "transfers" and you can do them at a bank or on a licensed broker.
The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
No, they don't. They may be a method of censorship resistance, but they weren't designed that way.
Audited for backdoors? Wishful thinking. Someone some years ago said they've added (some years before) backdoors to the OpenBSD IPSec implementation. The consensus is "its probably bullshit" and not "no, we checked and we can guarantee there is no backdoor". The lesson (in case you missed it) is that for crypto code, there are a hand full of guys that actually understand what is going on and how to implement and bypass something, and half of them work for the government. OpenBSD is too obscure for someone to care? See the TrueCrypt case.
Snowden reported that the CIA use it to anonomynise their research activity. Previously they used proxy servers but spooks would sign into social media or personal email, thus compromising the location as being CIA. Thus, The Onion Router was born. They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise.
> That is not a problem for open source that has been audited.
Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors.
> We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
>It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
