8 ms·
1) You need to be able to tie a BTC address to a human 2) Mixers
by RangerScience 6y ago
1) You need to be able to tie a BTC address to a human
2) Mixers
- runawaybottle 6y agoCan you really not follow the trail from the mixers?
- jonathanliu 6y agoCipherTrace says they lost the trail on the twitter hackers when they threw the btc they scammed into mixers. On the other hand, the Feds arrested a kid in Florida, so my question is... how did they find him?
- unangst 6y agoFeds = mixers
- kbaker 6y ago> It's not so much loose ends as loose everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24013070
- phire 6y agoOnly 20% of the funds went into mixers. If I had to guess, the attack was done by a group of people and they split the funds up. Some of them were smarter than others. It's also possible that the people who have been arrested are simply people who have received stolen goods (knowingly or unknownly). Perhaps they traded something else of value for the Bitcoin and didn't know how dirty it was.
- rtsil 6y agoThere are other ways to track them than the trail of their BTCs. For instance, did they apply a proper opsec hygiene? Did they brag about it, to friends online or offline?
- rydre 6y ago4chan. He wrote it there, afaik from a Twitter comment with screenshot posted many days ago before the Feds announced the kid. Then bragged about it and went for more accounts. His friends left him when he went for the high profile accounts. I think it was organized on discord.
- jdxcode 6y agoThe mixers keep a ledger outside the blockchain, so no—and a well written one wouldn't store any logs. You could possibly know that someone used a mixer but you wouldn't be able to track from the blockchain where the money came from. It could've come from 1000s of other transactions all with different amounts—none that would trace back to the source funds wallet.
- chrisseaton 6y agoDo you not tie yourself to your Bitcoin when you try to use it for something physical like turning it into cash or buying a physical asset? Can you not track all Bitcoins going in and out of a mixer?
- walrus01 6y agoI think one of the ideas of mixers is to achieve such a large volume of transactions that dedicating man-hours and personnel resources to tracking down every transaction path becomes cost prohibitive on the part of a law enforcement organization.
- jki275 6y agoThe idea is that you can't track any of the transaction paths. There's nothing tying a specific input transaction to a specific output transaction, and great pains are taken to ensure there cannot be any publicly available link.
- zenexer 6y ago500 unrelated accounts all deposit money into a single shared account. From that shared account, payments are made to 1,000 other accounts. None of the amounts match the original deposits, even when summed. Whose money is whose? This is an oversimplification, but it should give you a rough idea of how difficult it is to trace Bitcoin.
- vdfs 6y agoAuthorities might already know mixers service providers and a subpoena will give them all info they need. Not sure tho, I haven't used bitcoin but there always be weak link somewhere
- walrus01 6y agoI would be very surprised if any mixer operators are located in places that care in the slightest about a US subpoena (russia, etc).