Right, hence the problem: Bitcoin has no one to target with a warrant, while the private service used by the author does.
It depends on the the threat . Against governments with a search warrant looking for something specific, bitcoin would be better. Against governments doing secret large-scale surveillance, the bank may well be better.
True, but that's not nearly asymmetric enough in favor of the attacker -- the holder of the coins doesn't need to use so naive a method as to do them all at the same time. They can randomize the transfers to the point where they just blend in with the noise of regular transactions. Plus, you'd have to compare traffic analysis effectiveness against regular banking
You don't need to be that naive. But how clever do you have to be? And how clever are people actually being? Unless there's a randomisation strategy that comes with good reason to believe it's secure against unknown attacks, I wouldn't want to put too much confidence in the anonymity.
You don't need to be that naive. But how clever do you have to be?
Not at all. The protocols for bitlaundry-type arrangements just have to be updated to add random time delays all throughout. No extra effort on the user's side.
There's definitely a lot of extra work, though, that could be done on developing Bitcoin clients that automatically handle stuff like this. (It would have to, without being promted, generate new addresses every so often, and feed them to a service, either which has the time delays, or does it with a patter than would conceal data from traffic analysis.)
Annie Lowrey discusses Bitcoin in Slate. No clear thesis, but important that it gets attention there. She gives a general overview, with emphasis on its benefits to fringe elements on society, and gives quick attack at the end. The attack seems misinformed, but it links to something more interesting, specifically...
A technical critique by Victor Grishchenko, PhD, who was mentioned here in the context of causal trees. He describes a few problems he sees with Bitcoin:
1) Asymmetry favors attackers, in that it takes a lot more effort to check for double spending than to attempt a double-spend, eventually requiring "supernodes" that have disproportionate influence over the network.
2) It needs to continuously spend spend cycles to stay free from attackers. He then describes an attack I don't quite understand that involves holding on to a discovered block and then broadcasting it at just the right time
3) It doesn't compare well against existing systems in terms of privacy, speed, or transaction cost. (I found this questionable because the system he's comparing it to is still subject to warrants, and Bitcoin takes significantly less time -- 1 hour or so -- to ensure a transaction than the wiring transfers Grishchenko discribes.)
Finally, he credits Bitcoin in being advantageous similarly to Bittorrent: the latter was clumsy and complicated compared to regular downloading, but could perform well enough in a niche niche to force change in the broader markets.