Adam,
Thank you for your comments. We will address them in the next update.
Privacy is an area you have been championing for many years and your input in this area has created the environment for Bitcoin to exist. Anonymity is not something we would be willing to compromise, despite the general public's endless willingness to give away their intimate life histories and contact details to Facebook and other social media.
If you have the will to read a longish response, we have tried to expand a little on the rationale for the type of data we believe will be useful and valuable, in addition to broadly addressing the privacy issues.
Arguably, the greater the cryptographic protections on the ownership of a transaction, the more value will be placed on the nature of transactions. Without wishing to frame the conversation on specifics or particular sectors, here are some distinctions to address some of the previously noted Orwellian fears on attaching identity markers to Bitcoin transactions.
* We have no desire to create tools that can analyze which brand of baked beans Bob may prefer compared to Alice. That is a matter of extreme detail for supermarkets, their suppliers and internal point of sale systems. When you make a store purchase, your basket of goods are wrapped up in a single payment which appears on your credit card or bank statement. Knowing on an aggregated basis that people spend around $120 / week on retail shopping and that Saturday is the busiest period for that activity is more valuable for payment processors than knowing the contents of Bob's basket of goods.
As a retailer or supplier, I would buy that data in order to plan inventory, marketing budgets, promotional activity, staffing levels, logistics, factory production, bank borrowing, store expansion planning, etc.
* Now consider petrol. Bitcoin is very well suited for fuel purchases, especially for small independent petrol filling stations. Aggregated data would help the entire supply chain that serves the consumer, if businesses at the front end had access to data for when demand was at peaks and troughs. Extend that from individual petrol stations to regional, national and international consumer purchases and you have the basis of the market pricing oil based on demand per period and per country. Again, we don't care that it is actually Bob who fills up every Sunday so he has enough fuel to last him the week or to track him along his driving holiday.
* Now consider remittances. While the global headlines are that it is a $500bn a year industry. Few people know that remittances are based on a relatively small number of remittance corridors that make up the bulk of the market. These corridors are based around people leaving small towns and villages in poor areas and travelling to work in locations based on knowing someone or a family member who used to live in their area and are doing well in xyz location because they can see the beneficial impact on the recipients quality of life. At the coal face, remittances are a word of mouth grey market sector and part of the reason that WU and the like can charge so much is because the last mile of remittances are in areas where monetary infrastructure and logistics are difficult to serve and they can get away with setting high prices. They prosper because they use data to organise themselves better. Banks have no desire to serve this market because you end up clogging up branches every Friday or Saturday with people that transact relatively small sums compared to those that are banked and get annoyed waiting. Having access to Bitcoin transaction data on this sector would help Bitcoin businesses to understand the end points of this market and serve it better and focus their promotional activities. We have no desire to identify that Bob's cousin José is working illegally in Texas.
These are three sectors where there are millions of small businesses that would, for the first time, be able to access global, national and regional industry data figures typically reserved for large businesses due to the high cost of acquiring or commissioning research.
While increasing anonymity or having zero knowledge proofs in transactions is desirable so that I can keep my Bitcoin salary payments private and my membership of Ashley Madison out of the news, it would be helpful to know that when I want to spend my salary that the world around me is organised enough to serve my needs.
The block chain is ledger. It will contain a global data set that could end up being one of the most valuable databases in the world. Why not use it to fund Bitcoin's security infrastructure and growing bandwidth challenges?
Regards,
Ahmed