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You immediately unlink the transactions with Monero. You convert as much of your reward as you can into something more fungible like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Typi

You immediately unlink the transactions with Monero. You convert as much of your reward as you can into something more fungible like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Typically this means having several unverified exchange accounts created where you deposit and trade under the unverified account threshold and withdraw. (This is typically 2 bitcoin worth, per account, per 24 hours... but there is always some new exchange with no withdrawal limits and the decentralized exchanges are pretty robust these days) If that exchange doesn't offer Monero, or they have already blacklisted your Ethereum/Bitcoin addresses, then you Coinswitch or Shapeshift, or XMR.TO the rest. Once in Monero nobody can blacklist any of your addresses. You can stay in Monero forever if you like, as it is good enough for reintegration into the normal economy. Or you can reintegrate slowly in other ways, such as back into Ethereum on new exchange accounts or countswitch/shapeshifting back onto that blockchain, simply because there are more things to buy. And yes, it SHOULD go without saying that you should be doing this on Tails or Whonix, and having funded addresses that are unlinked from your identity to begin with. But everyone ever caught up in a legal action has done this part wrong so far.

busterarm 8y ago
If it looks like criminal behavior, LEO and the courts are going to treat it like criminal behavior. What you're suggesting carries a very large risk profile for someone living in a country where it can be safely assumed that all communications are captured. Someone who places a high value on their freedom and happens to live in most of the desirable countries probably shouldn't be doing this. OpSec shouldn't be treated lightly -- there's good reasons why folks like the grugq live in Thailand.
- gammateam 8y ago
  Right, the thing is there are 100 other reasons to use Monero if you spend any time using transparent blockchains. What is described here works for all 100 reasons and is a best practice and is indiscriminate from what a hacker needs to do The only "outlier" for your overzealous prosecutor's conspiracy charge is that not a lot of people understand this best practice. The solution? Talk about it.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    I'm with you, but I wouldn't roll the dice on a judge or jury with poorly understood technology. While there are 100 perfectly legitimate reasons to structure your transactions the exact same say someone laundering illicit money would, you probably don't want to become that test case.
    - gammateam 8y ago
      correct, you wouldn't want to get caught. either way, the US federal criminal charge of money laundering is heavily misunderstood by the public. people are uneasy at merely moving their own money, let alone watching someone else potentially obfuscate the origin of the money. obfuscating the origin isn't illegal the US federal money laundering requires the origin itself to be illicit AND THEN for it to be obfuscated so the government would already have to weigh what happened at the origin, they'd also have to know about the origin, and yeah in this one case it would have implications on the how smart contract intent is formed sure, you don't want to be the experiment, but its already a tall order to get there. save some money for appeals court.
- gruez 8y ago
  Isn't this only an issue in jurisdictions with civil forfeiture? If a $10M bag of cash materialized in your house, and you properly paid income tax on it, what can the government do?
  - gammateam 8y ago
    well in the US it is also illegal to pay tax on income from illicit sources. so people obfuscate the source and reintegrate into the economy from a new source. if this fails and the government investigates the obfuscation AND finds the source is illicit, then you have the same problem (well actually more crimes to be charged with). and no, this isn't a civil forfeiture issue, but also not mutually exclusive
- sharcerer 8y ago
  VPN+ Tor also not enough?
  - gammateam 8y ago
    In the 2015-2016 Playpen onion site cases, the FBI demonstrated an exploit which hopped outside of the TOR browser to run on clearnet and unmask the user's computers leading to many many indictments (unsure about convictions). So the mainstep is to have an entire environment that is hardened by TOR, which Whonix offers with its dual VM setup where the entire guest OS runs through a TOR gateway VM. Sure the exit node may still be problematic and thats where VPN comes in. But all this isn't really necessary for broadcasting a cryptocurrency transaction. You can create the transaction file anywhere and just have a different computer send that file to the cryptocurrency network (also called broadcasting the transaction). The network sees the IP address of the computer that relayed the transaction. On Ethereum's network many people use Infura, and therefore most nodes only see the IP address of Infura. You can broadcast to Infura over TOR. It is theoretically possible that Infura, your exit node and your VPN are all accessible by subpoena. The subpoena's need to be based on the idea of some wrongdoing, and since it isn't 2012 anymore, nobody is doing a dragnet on all cryptocurrency transactions. Yours would look just as benign as anyone else's, and anyone tracing the transaction would eventually be stonewalled by Monero's blockchain. So, that case has never been seen.
paulie_a 8y ago
Thanks for the guide on money laundering using crypto currency. It's shocking that crypto currency has such a bad reputation these days.
- gammateam 8y ago
  You're welcome. It is supposed to be provocative as this particular route isn't used nearly enough, you can read indictments and see that. There is a little bit of a shift, in one indictment the government was able to seize wallets and they were able to retrieve the addresses and amounts of Bitcoin, Zcash, but they could only make a footnote that they had a Monero wallet and didn't know the amounts or the addresses or senders of the recipients involved. Monero is a public but opaque blockchain, and should be the default holdings for people, with occasional interaction with the rest of the crypto economy for conversion. It should always be a buffer between your national currency accounts and your crypto economy accounts. It raises the bar for government investigations back to the level required to get information about your bank accounts. With banks, the government needs subpoenas and warrants for multiple financial institutions to learn about what an investigated customer is doing. With transparent blockchains, the government does not need a subpoena or warrant to analyze transactions and draw conclusions. They can just scan it like any other participant can. With Monero, the government would need subpoenas and warrants for multiple exchanges to learn about what an investigated customer is doing. And if the customer follows best practices, there are limitations on the information that the exchanges would have, because one hop into the Monero network and the funds are not traceable. It is then easy for the customer to hop onto another blockchain. European Commission has proposed banning the RingCT technology used here, but that is a knee-jerk reaction as they have just gotten used to the transparency that non-opaque blockchains like Bitcoin offer for investigators. General benign Monero use would be indiscriminate from money laundering, protecting everyone from financial sanctions and requiring law enforcement to do real investigations into whatever action they are actually trying to prevent, since they can no longer lazily leverage financial intermediaries.

busterarm 8y ago

If it looks like criminal behavior, LEO and the courts are going to treat it like criminal behavior. What you're suggesting carries a very large risk profile for someone living in a country where it can be safely assumed that all communications are captured. Someone who places a high value on their freedom and happens to live in most of the desirable countries probably shouldn't be doing this. OpSec shouldn't be treated lightly -- there's good reasons why folks like the grugq live in Thailand.

gammateam 8y ago
Right, the thing is there are 100 other reasons to use Monero if you spend any time using transparent blockchains. What is described here works for all 100 reasons and is a best practice and is indiscriminate from what a hacker needs to do The only "outlier" for your overzealous prosecutor's conspiracy charge is that not a lot of people understand this best practice. The solution? Talk about it.
- busterarm 8y ago
  I'm with you, but I wouldn't roll the dice on a judge or jury with poorly understood technology. While there are 100 perfectly legitimate reasons to structure your transactions the exact same say someone laundering illicit money would, you probably don't want to become that test case.
  - gammateam 8y ago
    correct, you wouldn't want to get caught. either way, the US federal criminal charge of money laundering is heavily misunderstood by the public. people are uneasy at merely moving their own money, let alone watching someone else potentially obfuscate the origin of the money. obfuscating the origin isn't illegal the US federal money laundering requires the origin itself to be illicit AND THEN for it to be obfuscated so the government would already have to weigh what happened at the origin, they'd also have to know about the origin, and yeah in this one case it would have implications on the how smart contract intent is formed sure, you don't want to be the experiment, but its already a tall order to get there. save some money for appeals court.
gruez 8y ago
Isn't this only an issue in jurisdictions with civil forfeiture? If a $10M bag of cash materialized in your house, and you properly paid income tax on it, what can the government do?
- gammateam 8y ago
  well in the US it is also illegal to pay tax on income from illicit sources. so people obfuscate the source and reintegrate into the economy from a new source. if this fails and the government investigates the obfuscation AND finds the source is illicit, then you have the same problem (well actually more crimes to be charged with). and no, this isn't a civil forfeiture issue, but also not mutually exclusive
sharcerer 8y ago
VPN+ Tor also not enough?
- gammateam 8y ago
  In the 2015-2016 Playpen onion site cases, the FBI demonstrated an exploit which hopped outside of the TOR browser to run on clearnet and unmask the user's computers leading to many many indictments (unsure about convictions). So the mainstep is to have an entire environment that is hardened by TOR, which Whonix offers with its dual VM setup where the entire guest OS runs through a TOR gateway VM. Sure the exit node may still be problematic and thats where VPN comes in. But all this isn't really necessary for broadcasting a cryptocurrency transaction. You can create the transaction file anywhere and just have a different computer send that file to the cryptocurrency network (also called broadcasting the transaction). The network sees the IP address of the computer that relayed the transaction. On Ethereum's network many people use Infura, and therefore most nodes only see the IP address of Infura. You can broadcast to Infura over TOR. It is theoretically possible that Infura, your exit node and your VPN are all accessible by subpoena. The subpoena's need to be based on the idea of some wrongdoing, and since it isn't 2012 anymore, nobody is doing a dragnet on all cryptocurrency transactions. Yours would look just as benign as anyone else's, and anyone tracing the transaction would eventually be stonewalled by Monero's blockchain. So, that case has never been seen.

paulie_a 8y ago

Thanks for the guide on money laundering using crypto currency. It's shocking that crypto currency has such a bad reputation these days.

gammateam 8y ago
You're welcome. It is supposed to be provocative as this particular route isn't used nearly enough, you can read indictments and see that. There is a little bit of a shift, in one indictment the government was able to seize wallets and they were able to retrieve the addresses and amounts of Bitcoin, Zcash, but they could only make a footnote that they had a Monero wallet and didn't know the amounts or the addresses or senders of the recipients involved. Monero is a public but opaque blockchain, and should be the default holdings for people, with occasional interaction with the rest of the crypto economy for conversion. It should always be a buffer between your national currency accounts and your crypto economy accounts. It raises the bar for government investigations back to the level required to get information about your bank accounts. With banks, the government needs subpoenas and warrants for multiple financial institutions to learn about what an investigated customer is doing. With transparent blockchains, the government does not need a subpoena or warrant to analyze transactions and draw conclusions. They can just scan it like any other participant can. With Monero, the government would need subpoenas and warrants for multiple exchanges to learn about what an investigated customer is doing. And if the customer follows best practices, there are limitations on the information that the exchanges would have, because one hop into the Monero network and the funds are not traceable. It is then easy for the customer to hop onto another blockchain. European Commission has proposed banning the RingCT technology used here, but that is a knee-jerk reaction as they have just gotten used to the transparency that non-opaque blockchains like Bitcoin offer for investigators. General benign Monero use would be indiscriminate from money laundering, protecting everyone from financial sanctions and requiring law enforcement to do real investigations into whatever action they are actually trying to prevent, since they can no longer lazily leverage financial intermediaries.