3 ms·

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 f

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.

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.