Businesses that accept Bitcoin may risk privacy problems
Businesses that accept Bitcoins as payment risk making the transactions publicly traceable, which could get companies in trouble with government regulators, experts say.
The privacy weakness within the digital currency's payment network was reported on Wednesday by Wired, which found troubling possibilities related to transaction tracking. The problem is in the way the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network works.
The open source payment system associates senders and recipients of money with an identification number meant to make transactions anonymous. However, all sales are recorded in the Bitcoin public ledger, so any entity could make a payment to a company and then track all other payments to that address.
