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> If a coffee shop accepts bitcoin, your transaction is effectively as untraceable as cash is today. How? There is no globally public record of all cash transa

> If a coffee shop accepts bitcoin, your transaction is effectively as untraceable as cash is today. How? There is no globally public record of all cash transactions, unlike with Bitcoin.

teawrecks 9y ago
Because at no point is your identity tied to the address.
- Retric 9y ago
  If you have an account with 100 mill in stolen bitcoins and use it at a coffee shop then looking at security footage is relatively trivial as there is a clear time stamp involved. Cash on the other hand might be traced at the bank, but it it's hard to directly link it unless their is a clear pattern of behavior. Even better, a random 5$ bill may not end up at the bank directly if someone get's change at the end of the day. Worse it's not just the government that can track bitcoins. I can easily see a gang keeping an eye on transactions looking for people with large accounts so they can use physical means of persuasion to liberate it.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies can be mixed. If you engage in very basic precautions, such as doing something easy like transferring your money to monero, and then back again, it is effectively impossible to track where your money came from. Once you get to the coffee shop stage, nobody knows where that money came from.
    - 21 9y ago
      With today statistical analysis methods is trivial to track big flows through various block chains, even if some of them are totally hidden. And they only get better by the day, with your traces sitting there like a duck. And you don't need to be 100% certain, it's enough to get a pool of suspects which then you can analyze/surveil with other methods.
      - tehlike 9y ago
        How about monero?
    - Retric 9y ago
      Bitcoins's high transaction costs and low transaction rate prevent that from working.
      - erik_seaberg 9y ago
        Because you trust yourself, you don't have to outbid everyone to get your transactions on the blockchain immediately.
        Retric 9y ago
        You still need to get on at some point. Plenty of people are willing to wait a few hours to get confirmed so the price never hits zero. Further, even if it did work you would make your mixing transactions stand out more while also vastly lowering the number of them.
- EGreg 9y ago
  But your identity IS tied to the address as soon as it is used in a physical transaction with youon camera. That's the whole point. Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering is all about preventing anonymous online transactions where real world goods are bought. So ultimately, how are you going to buy them? Send a homeless guy in to be on camera?
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Yes, and all the coffee shop knows is that you paid them money from an account that has a couple hundred dollars in it. You have your cold storage where most of your money is, and you have new wallets for the purpose of hold your X thousand dollars of general spending money. In the same way that a coffee shop can notice that you have physical dollars bills in your wallet that you just pulled out to pay from. If your coins were mixed (or transferred through monero and back again, or whatever), it can't be tracked where the money came from. And this isn't even getting into the really interesting stuff that is coming down the pipeline, such at decentralized exchanges.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      So now you are on the hook for using coins that have gone through a mixer. The governments have the most leverage over exchanges and whoever "cashes out" Starbucks. If they tell them to stop taking coins that have been through a mixer then what are you going to do? China for example recently banned all exchanges period. We need the majority coins to go through mixers same we need more people to use TLS / Tor / whatever for there to be any strength in numbers. And even then, Russia and China can do practically whatever the government wants: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/vladimir-putin-russia-smoking-ban-plan-born-after-2015-cigarettes/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/v...
      - stale2002 9y ago
        I mean, at that point you may as well say "what if the government just decides to ban bitcoin". But they aren't doing THAT. Blacklisting certain addresses is arguably 'harder' for the government to do than a simple straight up ban. Blacklisting address is difficult, as the coins can quickly and easily be transferred to an unexpecting, innocent party. And now all of a sudden ALL coins are tainted. What, is the average person going to track which coins are on the secret government blacklist and which aren't? If they don't do that then their coins are at risk of being tainted, and now THEY are on the ever expanding blacklist as well. The government has only 1 option, a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies. Anything else is just this impossible game of wakamole that will hurt innocents way more than the bad guys. If they don't do the blanket ban, then the cat is out of the bag.

> If a coffee shop accepts bitcoin, your transaction is effectively as untraceable as cash is today. How? There is no globally public record of all cash transactions, unlike with Bitcoin.

teawrecks 9y ago

Because at no point is your identity tied to the address.

Retric 9y ago
If you have an account with 100 mill in stolen bitcoins and use it at a coffee shop then looking at security footage is relatively trivial as there is a clear time stamp involved. Cash on the other hand might be traced at the bank, but it it's hard to directly link it unless their is a clear pattern of behavior. Even better, a random 5$ bill may not end up at the bank directly if someone get's change at the end of the day. Worse it's not just the government that can track bitcoins. I can easily see a gang keeping an eye on transactions looking for people with large accounts so they can use physical means of persuasion to liberate it.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Cryptocurrencies can be mixed. If you engage in very basic precautions, such as doing something easy like transferring your money to monero, and then back again, it is effectively impossible to track where your money came from. Once you get to the coffee shop stage, nobody knows where that money came from.
  - 21 9y ago
    With today statistical analysis methods is trivial to track big flows through various block chains, even if some of them are totally hidden. And they only get better by the day, with your traces sitting there like a duck. And you don't need to be 100% certain, it's enough to get a pool of suspects which then you can analyze/surveil with other methods.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      How about monero?
  - Retric 9y ago
    Bitcoins's high transaction costs and low transaction rate prevent that from working.
    - erik_seaberg 9y ago
      Because you trust yourself, you don't have to outbid everyone to get your transactions on the blockchain immediately.
      - Retric 9y ago
        You still need to get on at some point. Plenty of people are willing to wait a few hours to get confirmed so the price never hits zero. Further, even if it did work you would make your mixing transactions stand out more while also vastly lowering the number of them.
EGreg 9y ago
But your identity IS tied to the address as soon as it is used in a physical transaction with youon camera. That's the whole point. Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering is all about preventing anonymous online transactions where real world goods are bought. So ultimately, how are you going to buy them? Send a homeless guy in to be on camera?
- stale2002 9y ago
  Yes, and all the coffee shop knows is that you paid them money from an account that has a couple hundred dollars in it. You have your cold storage where most of your money is, and you have new wallets for the purpose of hold your X thousand dollars of general spending money. In the same way that a coffee shop can notice that you have physical dollars bills in your wallet that you just pulled out to pay from. If your coins were mixed (or transferred through monero and back again, or whatever), it can't be tracked where the money came from. And this isn't even getting into the really interesting stuff that is coming down the pipeline, such at decentralized exchanges.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    So now you are on the hook for using coins that have gone through a mixer. The governments have the most leverage over exchanges and whoever "cashes out" Starbucks. If they tell them to stop taking coins that have been through a mixer then what are you going to do? China for example recently banned all exchanges period. We need the majority coins to go through mixers same we need more people to use TLS / Tor / whatever for there to be any strength in numbers. And even then, Russia and China can do practically whatever the government wants: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/vladimir-putin-russia-smoking-ban-plan-born-after-2015-cigarettes/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/v...
    - stale2002 9y ago
      I mean, at that point you may as well say "what if the government just decides to ban bitcoin". But they aren't doing THAT. Blacklisting certain addresses is arguably 'harder' for the government to do than a simple straight up ban. Blacklisting address is difficult, as the coins can quickly and easily be transferred to an unexpecting, innocent party. And now all of a sudden ALL coins are tainted. What, is the average person going to track which coins are on the secret government blacklist and which aren't? If they don't do that then their coins are at risk of being tainted, and now THEY are on the ever expanding blacklist as well. The government has only 1 option, a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies. Anything else is just this impossible game of wakamole that will hurt innocents way more than the bad guys. If they don't do the blanket ban, then the cat is out of the bag.