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I wondered about this. Yes, you may have stolen some bitcoin from people but you can't do anything with it. It's all traceable through the blockchain. You can'
by philbarr 9y ago
I wondered about this. Yes, you may have stolen some bitcoin from people but you can't do anything with it. It's all traceable through the blockchain.
You can't buy anything directly with it because as soon as you receive the goods the police will force the person who provided the goods to you to give away your details.\
You can't take it out into your bank account because that will also identify you.
So - a bitcoin mixer would seem your best bet, but even then it just makes it "more difficult" to trace. Not sure I'd want to risk many years in prison on that.
- spery 9y agoSo basically the anonymity it provides is being a simple alias instead on full name in the eyes of authorities? How does one stay anonymous without being perceived as a threat by authorities is the million bitcoin question
- krapp 9y ago>How does one stay anonymous without being perceived as a threat by authorities is the million bitcoin question It shouldn't matter if you're perceived as a threat by authorities if you're anonymous. Bitcoin's biggest selling point is that it's supposed to render governments and law enforcement impotent to interfere with transactions, regardless of their legality.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- elmar 9y agojust buy Monero using Bitcoin and then buy Bitcoin again using the Monero.
- zwily 9y agoWhere do you convert the BTC to Monero? Most exchanges require id and stuff.
- sschueller 9y agoYou can do it on bitsquare[1] directly via Tor [1] https://bitsquare.io/ https://bitsquare.io/
- ixnari 9y agoOne could use ShapeShift. It doesn't use accounts, so no ID required. https://shapeshift.io https://shapeshift.io
- elmar 9y agoBitcoin Exchange ShapeShift Helps Police As WannaCry Attacker Converts To Monero https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-exchange-shapeshift-helps-police-as-wannacry-attacker-converts-to-monero https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-exchange-shapeshift-h...
- olegkikin 9y agoFirst of all, it's not really traceable. You can sell them on LocalBitcoins, and an outside observer will never know - all you see is coins moving from A to B. Second of all, you can mix them with other coins, which instantly crushes all hopes of traceability. Example: Imagine you have wallets A (clean) and B (stolen) with 1 BTC each. You put them both into wallet C, and then you split it again equally into X and Y. Where is the stolen money now? And then there are altcoin exchanges.
- numbsafari 9y agoThe holder of C could potentially be prosecuted for receiving stolen property, under AML laws, or as a co-conspirator in the original theft.
- koolba 9y agoIf you replace bitcoin with cash, by your logic I'd be arrested for selling a thief an apple if he paid for it with stolen cash. That's the distinction. Is it money or is it a fenced good? If I'm receiving currency (be it real money or bitcoin), I'm not going to think about where it came from. It's fungible.
- numbsafari 9y agoUnless he's reaching into a giant purple spattered bag that says "bank vault" and the name of a bank you know was robbed.
- thisisit 9y agoThen you will be asked to cooperate and reveal the identity of the thief. If you don't, then yes you are in "potential" trouble.
- koolba 9y agoI see no issue with cooperating. If they want to see my security footage then let them get a subpoena. If they want to see the IP logs and customer data for a potential money launderer, it's the same bar.
- dis-sys 9y ago> as soon as you receive the goods the police will force the person who provided the goods to you to give away your details if this is true, then there shouldn't be any bad guy selling stolen credit card numbers online.
- philbarr 9y agoI assume they aren't being chased because there isn't enough impetus on the part of the police to do so. But something high profile like WannaCry might make the authorities do a bit more work.
- snakeanus 9y agoThey could buy Monero or some other anonymous cryptocurrency.
- GordonS 9y agoNo exchange is going to touch BTC from these addresses. If they send the coins to an exchange, the exchange is going to contact law enforcement and they have lost their coins.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eigenvalue 9y agoDo you know this for a fact? Do big exchanges really maintain a list of "blacklisted" addresses? Wouldn't they need to constantly be growing that list to include the destinations of any transactions originating from the blacklisted addresses?
- GordonS 9y agoThey would probably only need to blacklist addresses from major thefts likely to have legal implications. I don't think it's a big task to keep it updated. The big exchanges are making a lot of money, so it would seem incredibly ill-advised for exchanges not to do this - the risks are simply far too high.
- jlebrech 9y agocouldn't they sit on the bitcoin for a few years and transfer it to a local currency where they didn't do any crimes.
- GordonS 9y agoBut how do they transfer it to a local currency in a non-traceable way? The passage of time is not going to change their wallet addresses.
- jlebrech 9y agoask an innocent party to cash out for them. or sell the bitcoin for another cryptocurrency
- GordonS 9y agoHow are you going to sell it though? It's very likely that exchanges have blacklisted addresses involved in large-scale crimes, and wouldn't touch the coins. They make large sums of money through legitimate business, and don't need that kind of risk.
- gwbas1c 9y agoBecause Bitcoin isn't really anonymous. It's pseudo-anonymous. You don't know who owns the wallet, but you can trace which wallets the coins are transferred two, indefinitely. (This is how Bitcoin solves the double-spending problem, which is why Bitcoin is the first e-currency to gain traction.) Thus, everyone knows that the coins that were in this particular wallet are hot. Even if the owner "cashes out" in a few years, the buyer is holding hot coins and can't do much with them.
- celticninja 9y agobut they can be mixed and diluted so that the hackers can cash out and no one will realise they have the stolen coins until it is too late.
- scorcher 9y agoMixers actually make it impossible to trace. What typically happens is you deposit an amount. Some amount similar to that minus a fee is then sent to the address or addresses of your choice in multiple small transactions over a period of time from seemingly unconnected addresses. It completely breaks the tractability of the history.
- GordonS 9y agoYes, but I don't any mixers would touch these coins for fear of facing action by law enforcement.
- rodiger 9y agoA lot of mixers are automated / are designed for this exact purpose
- GordonS 9y agoYes, the operation of the mixer itself is automated, but I've wager than the owners have blacklisted addresses known to be involved with massive BTC theft - it just doesn't make sense to touch them from a risk perspective.
- pricechild 9y agoWould that really be effective? Isn't it relatively cheap to create a new wallet?
- rodiger 9y agoIt is free afaik
- GordonS 9y agoSorry, I don't get what you mean? Do you mean the criminals could simply move the coins to a new wallet before moving them to an exchange? Transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are public, so it's relatively easy to keep tabs on movements of known criminal proceeds (as the article demonstrates :)
- whipoodle 9y agoMmm, I'm pretty sure there are ways to transfer to other cryptocurrencies so that you can move the money untraceably.
- tomjen3 9y agoYou only need some Russian or other bank willing to lose your details for a fee and you are in the clear. Heck, get a Cayman shell company and your name is never going to be on anything until the day you buy a return ticket and only use it one way, the onto a nice country with no extradition treaty.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoMixers are so 2012 though. Its 2017 and you just discovered mixers, immediately noticed the obvious potential flaw in mixers but not even the good flaws, and didn't consider every other improvement over the last HALF DECADE. Yeah Internet Explorer 7 is pretty bad too, congratulation you just got hired nowhere with that tidbit. Okay, now according to the rules here I have to say something helpful, see below: The primary goal is to - unlink - your transaction. First, the mixers are primarily hidden services on TOR, but even if they aren't, you would use a mixer over TOR. Ultimately, you get different bitcoins back over time. Mixers have reputation and you hope they don't undermine that reputation this particular time. Its a slow process and pretty bad experience. The mixer's "tainted" coins are liquid and fungible enough. Second, well mixing on the same blockchain kind of sucks. But wait how would you even know if the person trying to obfuscate and unlink is even using the same blockchain? Again, its not 2012 anymore and there are thousands of blockchains they could have been paid out in, and you wouldn't know because you are an armchair sleuth clicking across bitcoin addresses in 2017 playing detective. Such high tech chain analysis. Third, but okay, some service is probably still keeping records of these blockchain transfers, this just delays the detective work as people wise up to cross chain movement ... maybe in 2022? Rhetorical question. Turns out, some blockchains aren't like the others, and some cryptocurrencies don't use blockchains at all. Enter Monero. Monero does use a blockchain. Monero's blockchain does not contain: - sender's address (or any plain text addresses for that matter) - recipient's address (or any plain text addresses for that matter) - transaction amounts so now you just need a "mixer" that lets you swap your unfungible coin to a fungible coin like Monero. Hm, well since its already 2017, as you've realized, what services do that? www.shapeshift.io - Many to many asset exchange. No accounts needed. Doesn't store funds, just a pretty GUI on a mixer. Low transaction limits. www.xmr.to - Monero to bitcoin, bitcoin to Monero transmitter. No accounts needed. Doesn't store funds, just a pretty GUI on a mixer. Decent transaction limits. www.changelly.com - Many to many asset exchange. No accounts actually needed. Extremely high transaction limits, but the spread just gets worse. no accounts needed on any of those, and if they pretend you do, just use TOR and a fake email address. You'll still get your opaque coins. Unlike most cryptocurrencies that you've never heard of, Monero has USD markets on well known exchanges and is a very active market. The project hopes its fungibility improvements make it more valuable than bitcoin-style blockchains, while the technology advances to get the scalability improvements as well, eventually. One of the rebuttals posted here was that all of the services will blacklist the bitcoin addresses that are tainted. This is not true, even the ones that are interested in doing so just don't update that fast. There have been several times in the past where I paid bitcoin invoices, using a mixer/exchange like xmr.to. I just put the service provider's bitcoin address as the recipient, and I sent Monero to the mixer. Why would you want everyone knowing how much you ever had in any address? I didn't want that and I opted out. You wouldn't know if a hacker that accepted bitcoin was doing the same thing.