Sounds like you have never tried.

Buying bitcoins anonymously is very difficult due to money laundering laws. Spending them anonymously is not "simple" either.

Your best bet would be to mine them yourself and then pay over a public wifi with a throw-away laptop.

But really, cash in an envelope is less error-prone. Just don't leave your DNA-sample on it.

I use it daily.

- I mine

- you can buy them to your name, and then after a few transfers/transactions it would take the collaboration of an army of disparate users worldwide to determine where did the coins come from

- #bitcoin-otc in freenode

Although I do agree that's not easy to grasp for outsiders. It takes some time to get familiar with the best options. There's no way in hell they can connect your id with your coins (or a subset of it you keep for stuff like this) if you are moderately careful. Even satoshi-dice does the trick.

> you can buy them to your name, and then after a few transfers/transactions it would take the collaboration of an army of disparate users worldwide to determine where did the coins come from

Sounds exactly like money laundering to me, even if there isn't malicious intent. I'm genuinely surprised the government hasn't done much to try killing off bitcoin, even with it being (relatively speaking) a tiny fringe movement.

Money laundering is used to get the books to add up, it's more to do with accounting. The actual medium of cash is irrelevant.

What muyuu is talking about is akin to wiping your dollar notes, to remove any dna evidence that you ever touched them

I thought anonimity was a big point of bitcoin, I'm a little stunned. So you're saying if I buy bitcoins off Mt Grox or somewhere else, each coin contains some data linking back to me?

The way you track down someone using Bitcoin is complicated. Let me explain the way the Bitcoin network works.

Conventional banking assigns each new identity that enters through the door an account, to access that account you prove your identity. All transactions are kept confidential and in-house.

Bitcoin works by giving everyone an account and forgoing any identification. If you own the private key to the account you are the account holder. Next, all transactions are publicized. Since no one has ID information tied to their Bitcoin wallet, it doesn't matter if transactions are publicized.

Now here is how you get found out. If you use a service such as Mt. Gox which requires you to tie your identification to your Mt. Gox account, any bitcoins you send from Mt. Gox can be traced. So, when you corrupt bitcoins by using a site that has id on you, you lose your anonymity.

Throw-away laptop? Wouldn't a liveCD and changing you MAC address suffice?

Yes that or cash in the mail might be reasonable options for paying.

I guess my problem is more that you are trusting an overall unknown entity with your real ip, which is only one step away from your real info for someone who is able to compel that information from the VPN provider in the first place.