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Why do people say it 'Cant be tracked'? Its a fully public ledger. I would think that it could be tracked much easier than dollars that remain liquid or launder

by nartz 9y ago

Why do people say it 'Cant be tracked'? Its a fully public ledger. I would think that it could be tracked much easier than dollars that remain liquid or laundered.

arca_vorago 9y ago
Because that's why they want it over anonymousish paper money.
stale2002 9y ago
It is actually pretty difficult to track, if you know what you are doing. All you have to do is use a mixer. The advantage that it has over paper money is that I can almost instantly send it anywhere in the world, for cheap.
HNNoLikey 9y ago
I've heard that bitcoin mixers can take care of completely/somewhat obfuscating coin ownership. > According to Wikipedia: User can send his bitcoins on this service, pay small commission, and then receive the same sum of utterly different bitcoins. If they're paid out to one address it still wouldn't provide the desired level of anonymity, if however they are paid out to multiple addresses belonging to the same user, I would imagine the anonymity level would increase but not totally since one could still add up payments made to different addresses whose total should amount to a given range.
- phyalow 9y ago
  Yes possible but impractical when you split the new payments to multiple new addresses, in unequal amounts and at random times....
  - PeanutCurry 9y ago
    This has been what I've read as well. Unless a massive and coordinated entity like Five Eyes has decided to focus a significant amount of its resources on you, bitcoin mixers seem to provide 'adequate' levels of obfuscation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lagadu 9y ago
The problem is the difficulty of tying an arbitrary amount of addresses to a person. Anyone can generate any amount of addresses instantly out of nowhere and be paid to them. Lets say you have x btc that you received as payment from some illegal activity. You can make any number of payments to any number of addresses of your choice, some of which are yours (new addresses, so they're not associated with you yet), some of which are not. You still have control over all your btc but nobody knows what is "you" and what is someone else. While it's everything there in the blockchain for anyone to explore, if properly managed the address system does provide a high level of anonymity by current standards. edit: a btc address is effectively just calculating a hash, behind it you have good old public key cryptography so it's very easy to generate and can even be done offline.

by nartz 9y ago

Why do people say it 'Cant be tracked'? Its a fully public ledger. I would think that it could be tracked much easier than dollars that remain liquid or laundered.

arca_vorago 9y ago

Because that's why they want it over anonymousish paper money.

stale2002 9y ago

It is actually pretty difficult to track, if you know what you are doing. All you have to do is use a mixer. The advantage that it has over paper money is that I can almost instantly send it anywhere in the world, for cheap.

HNNoLikey 9y ago

I've heard that bitcoin mixers can take care of completely/somewhat obfuscating coin ownership. > According to Wikipedia: User can send his bitcoins on this service, pay small commission, and then receive the same sum of utterly different bitcoins. If they're paid out to one address it still wouldn't provide the desired level of anonymity, if however they are paid out to multiple addresses belonging to the same user, I would imagine the anonymity level would increase but not totally since one could still add up payments made to different addresses whose total should amount to a given range.

phyalow 9y ago
Yes possible but impractical when you split the new payments to multiple new addresses, in unequal amounts and at random times....
- PeanutCurry 9y ago
  This has been what I've read as well. Unless a massive and coordinated entity like Five Eyes has decided to focus a significant amount of its resources on you, bitcoin mixers seem to provide 'adequate' levels of obfuscation.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

lagadu 9y ago

The problem is the difficulty of tying an arbitrary amount of addresses to a person. Anyone can generate any amount of addresses instantly out of nowhere and be paid to them. Lets say you have x btc that you received as payment from some illegal activity. You can make any number of payments to any number of addresses of your choice, some of which are yours (new addresses, so they're not associated with you yet), some of which are not. You still have control over all your btc but nobody knows what is "you" and what is someone else. While it's everything there in the blockchain for anyone to explore, if properly managed the address system does provide a high level of anonymity by current standards. edit: a btc address is effectively just calculating a hash, behind it you have good old public key cryptography so it's very easy to generate and can even be done offline.