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I don't know the details of the tracing, but let's say I control the wallet that is to receive the ransom. Wouldn't it be "trivial" for me to sell some to e.g.

I don't know the details of the tracing, but let's say I control the wallet that is to receive the ransom. Wouldn't it be "trivial" for me to sell some to e.g. a Chinese millionaire, who in turn would transfer me some money from his Cyprus bank account to mine? Or replace "Chinese" with any country where there's less "Know your customer" requirements. It's probably not even that hard for a Chinese millionaire to pay one of his housekeepers a lot of Yuans to borrow her identity card to open that account...

tshaddox 6y ago
Sure, if you want to trust another party to clean the money, then of course you can conceal the trail of custody from the blockchain.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
All of that is traceable too. And, no. Some chinese millionaire is not going to wire you cash in return for a private key. What if you vanish? What's he going to do - sue you? This stuff only happens when they know where you live and your kids go to school. Money laundering IRL is hard - and compared to cold cash, bitcoin is accepted in very few places so it cannot be easily off ramped So I am going to guess bitcoin in crime is mostly like stolen artworks. Someone steals the painting and a newspaper says "20 million dollar painting stolen" and they can use it as a deposit on a drug deal (maybe at 200k worth). At a guess bitcoins are passed around from phone to phone, part-cash part-BTC (like part cash part shares buyouts). Just the ten minutes wait for the transaction to clear probably involves people nervously fingering guns. Of course, signal analysis helps here too. If I am right then there is a ring of transactions all of which are dirty, and if you break one through poor ops sec (same phone used for drug deal and for day trading) then you get a ton of good info. If someone used a burner phone for that one transaction then it's hard - but how many ur ed phones were turned on just once in a given city at a specific ten minute window. And now how many phones were on that same cell tower when that came online . Yeah these things are traceable.

tshaddox 6y ago

Sure, if you want to trust another party to clean the money, then of course you can conceal the trail of custody from the blockchain.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

All of that is traceable too. And, no. Some chinese millionaire is not going to wire you cash in return for a private key. What if you vanish? What's he going to do - sue you? This stuff only happens when they know where you live and your kids go to school. Money laundering IRL is hard - and compared to cold cash, bitcoin is accepted in very few places so it cannot be easily off ramped So I am going to guess bitcoin in crime is mostly like stolen artworks. Someone steals the painting and a newspaper says "20 million dollar painting stolen" and they can use it as a deposit on a drug deal (maybe at 200k worth). At a guess bitcoins are passed around from phone to phone, part-cash part-BTC (like part cash part shares buyouts). Just the ten minutes wait for the transaction to clear probably involves people nervously fingering guns. Of course, signal analysis helps here too. If I am right then there is a ring of transactions all of which are dirty, and if you break one through poor ops sec (same phone used for drug deal and for day trading) then you get a ton of good info. If someone used a burner phone for that one transaction then it's hard - but how many ur ed phones were turned on just once in a given city at a specific ten minute window. And now how many phones were on that same cell tower when that came online . Yeah these things are traceable.