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Bitcoin is a ‘boon for surveillance’, says former CIA director

albertTJames 6y ago
This is misleading. Crypto is used by most ransomwares nowadays and terrorist groups have embraced crypto as a valid source of financing. That crypto is still a low percentage of overall illicit transactions makes sense, but give it 10 more years and that wont be the case anymore. https://t.co/TFB02c7FEM https://t.co/TFB02c7FEM
- berkes 6y ago
  That assumes that legitimate use does not also grow. Which is a baseless assumption.
anonytrary 6y ago
That's why Zcash, Dash, Monero, et al. are probably going to pop off. That, or become completely illegal, we'll see... not even sure if that can even be enforced beyond pushing centralized exchanges to delist the coins. Coinbase delisted Ripple a few months ago, and Ripple just 5x'd in the past month, so I'm not sure how effective one-off delisting actually is.
- bouncycastle 6y ago
  They've already been delisted by exchanges in Australia, although voluntarily, not by law. IMO The whole world has gone mad with the need for surveillance of everything.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    delisting doesn't really change anything. The real threat would be if exchanges started blocking accounts that received BTC deposits from known monero-BTC exchange accounts. Luckily, they can't really do that, since people would be able to poison an arbitrary BTC wallet just by sending them a quantity of BTC laundered via monero. But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill.
    - ancientworldnow 6y ago
      The monero atomic swap feature means you can go from BTC to XMR without ever even touching an exchange or one of their wallets.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        BTC to XMR, sure. But XMR to BTC is the value proposition -- if you've made a fortune doing something illegal, you'll want to have access to the BTC market somehow. Right now, you can probably do that without being sent to prison. It's a matter of using one of the many conversion websites to go from XMR to BTC, then depositing to your exchange and selling it. (I don't know how you'd explain it on a tax form, but maybe you can think of something clever.) But if exchanges start actively cracking down on any account that deposits BTC in response to XMR transactions (i.e. the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites), they can start putting accounts on hold if those accounts have received large quantities of BTC from any of those XMR-related BTC wallets.
        varajelle 6y ago
        The atomic swap works both ways. Also with the lightning network you can mix and change different crypto currencies, and it can be really hard to trace the provenance of the coins. Not something an exchange can do automatically. > the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites Remember that new wallet can be created for each transactions. So even if they'd try to do that, it wouldn't work.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        You can certainly map clusters of BTC wallets. It doesn’t matter if you create a new wallet for that purpose, since those new wallets are contaminated by the transaction history. Basically, from the exchange’s view, they’d bucket the wallets into either “looks like mixing; hold the account” or “seems legit.” Most wallets aren’t used for any high volume transactions; most account holders at Coinbase have no need for that. So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories, and handle the middle ground manually. In other words, yes, XRP is very clever. That’s not the problem. The problem is, you’ll someday find it very hard to convert large quantities of XMR to USD without risking jail time.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    You have exact corect purposes here: no governemint ought to be having surveilance on financial transaction. They are even atempt to removeing cash for to grow surveilance. This is horible and we must have stopping it.
  - bruce343434 6y ago
    australia is such a cuckolded nation when it comes to privacy and technology
- bawolff 6y ago
  Are they really any better? Zcash has performance issues resulting in fewer people using the private features (privacy is about blending into a crowd. Hard to do that if the crowd is small), dash sounds like a fancier version of normal bitcoin coin laundry. Monero is probably the best but still doesn't provide any math based garuntees, so it's hard to know what it really gives. Then again, they dont need to provide privacy, just the preception thereof. (I stopped paying attention to cryptocurrencies a while ago. My opinions may be outdated)
  - ianmiers 6y ago
    In terms of protocols, not specific coins, privacy is clearly technically viable. Take Zcash: for its underlying protocol, known as sapling, the performance issues went away. It's about 2.5 seconds to make a fully private transaction on a pixel 3 and you could get it down to 1 second with some optimizations to the underlying circuit. As a coin, Zcash still has privacy adoption problems, but the roots of that aren't some fundamental technical issue: Zcash isn't focusing on usability, leading to the usage problems. That may change. Also, there are a number of projects coming on line using the same privacy tech. Good privacy is feasible, we have the technical protocols. But product-market-fit niche isn't entirely there yet: the problem is few people grasp then need for on chain privacy yet.
    - baby 6y ago
      There’s still the issue that you need to sync to the full history and look at all the outputs to see if they’re yours right? That’s a real challenge as a light client (which most people are).
      - ianmiers 6y ago
        For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money and find the payment. There's even a draft spec for doing it for Zcash. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a51619d899746b1d35f47790cbee665059c85d22cc12b64fd77c750 https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a...
- dominostars 6y ago
  MobileCoin is notable here as well, as they’re promising privacy and being integrated into signal
  - sschueller 6y ago
    What is notable is that the government has an easy target to monitor or get rid of mobile coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
- csomar 6y ago
  Decentralized Exchanges are a matter of time. The best the current establishment can do is provide a superior UX for a DEX or on-off ramps to the traditional markets.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    I don’t think we will ever see this. The incentive to modify the code and make it do “evil” things is too high.
    - zelly 6y ago
      We do see it though. There's Uniswap and Bancor on ETH. The trading volumes are in the billions of United States dollars per day. There is also Bisq as a decentralized fiat onramp for BTC and XMR (and soon on-chain atomic swaps). Today it is possible to completely interact with the crypto ecosystem without centralized exchanges. If you're worried about the code changing, you can run e.g. ETH nodes yourself, download the DEX frontends, and run the DEX locally.
      - intotheabyss 6y ago
        Or you can visit uniswap.eth if you have metamask installed since it resolves ENS domains.
      - randomopining 6y ago
        Except how do you go from crypto to USD on a decentralized exchange lol... You don't
        andxor 6y ago
        https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
    - andxor 6y ago
      Uniswap has more daily volume than Coinbase.
- WinstonSmith84 6y ago
  Probably Coinbase is going to relist XRP. That was probably to be beyond conform in regard to their IPO and the SEC investigation in Ripple, now settled ... As for Zcash and Monero, yes, these are sensibly some more anonymous cryptos, still nothing as anonymous as some simple bank notes .. :-) Btw, when I see the amount of people thinking that Bitcoin is used (nowadays) for illegal activities, and commenting about it on HN (which has theoretically a more educated audience), this is mind-blowing how little Bitcoin is understood at the moment. It feels like our governments have made a really good job of disinformation
  - Laforet 6y ago
    Once upon a time you could actually buy goods and services like pizza and games with BTC, nowadays the most likely reason for an average person to buy bitcoin is to pay the ransom for their locked up computer. Without a legitimate use case (selling your nintendo switch to somebody in venezuela does not count) BTC will be forever associated with the small scale crime scene.
    - Tenoke 6y ago
      This is definitely not true. The most likely reason for someone to buy BTC is speculation. Darknet markets and ransomware volume is tiny in comparison.
    - xur17 6y ago
      You can still buy pizza and games with BTC. If anything, I'd argue that the market for this has increased.
    - WinstonSmith84 6y ago
      BTC was never meant to be used to purchase groceries (transaction fees + limitation on the number of tx/s). There are other cryptos which (could) do that very well, however. But large bank transfer may be convenient with Bitcoin: have you ever purchased a used car, not for $500USD, but for $10k+? Arguably, it's a legal, but definitely an edge case. Just giving an example :-) Speculation is one thing, but BTC is going nowhere and in a world hit by an incoming significant inflation, many have understood that Bitcoin is simply an easy place where to safeguard your wealth if the outlook is at least +5 years, not days / months. That's why people buy Bitcoins at the moment.
- MrMan 6y ago
  I think it is good for criminals to have a separate system like monero. Then law enforcement and intelligence can attack it without worries about disrupting the legitimate system.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Out of all privacy coins, Monero is the only one with a future.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    One-liner with no arguments for why you believe so, great comment! Why don't you tell us why this is a "one-takes-it-all" market and why specifically Monero?
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      Because Monero's the only coin that can't actually be traced or tainted. Looks like even government agencies haven't been able to break it yet. It's also actually useful as currency due to low transaction fees.
busymom0 6y ago
Slightly off topic but SEC is going after small competition to YouTube LBRY and Odysee platform by claiming their LBRY Credits are "securities" and thus need to be regulated. If this happens to LBRY, then other cryptocurrencies will be next. https://helplbrysavecrypto.com/faq https://helplbrysavecrypto.com/faq Video summaries: > SEC vs. LBRY Could be DEVASTATING! Viva & Barnes HIGHLIGHT: https://youtu.be/kB_TrpRikq8 https://youtu.be/kB_TrpRikq8 > SEC vs. LBRY Crypto Lawsuit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JyIPFuUbWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JyIPFuUbWg
- vmception 6y ago
  that's okay, the market hasn't seemed to really care about any of that. its been a Sword of Damocles hanging over many tokens heads, and sometimes they've dropped pretty hard on the teams and the market shrugged it off. the issue is that actual unregistered securities can't be traded by custodial exchanges, and registered securities have to be traded by broker dealers, and none of that exists or has any liquidity in crypto land. but the autonomous non-custodial exchanges have more volume and liquidity now anyway so nobody cares.
- null0pointer 6y ago
  Is LBRY a registered business? I don't see how SEC could regulate cryptos much more than they already do. I suppose the could force US exchanges to disable withdrawals like the Chinese government did a while ago for Chinese exchanges. Other than that there's nothing they can do regulation wise.
- ve55 6y ago
  There are very specific requirements with strong precedent (see: Howey Test https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp) that must be met to be considered a security, and it is very clear that currencies like Bitcoin don't meet them. If various bodies wish to regulate it, there are plenty easier and stronger tools to use than securities laws. With that said, many companies involved in minting their own cryptocurrency (primarily during the IPO craze a few years ago) did sell unregistered securities in plain sight, often committing massive fraud alongside it, and it's no surprise that the SEC has been catching up with it over the last few years.
legerdemain 6y ago
A number of voices from government and surveillance circles, like Thiel et al, have come forward lately to caution about "big problems" with Bitcoin. I have to conclude that Bitcoin is actually winning, and these people are just spreading FUD in an effort to crush something they can't control.
- boc 6y ago
  Just to bring some perspective, JP Morgan alone transfers the equivalent of the U.S. real gross domestic product each week. $2.8T per day, just by one bank. Bitcoin+all of crypto combined is nowhere close to that scale. Bitcoin sees around 300k transactions per day. It's miniscule.
  - er4hn 6y ago
    Minor nit, but you are comparing amount transferred vs number of transactions. Yes, there is a difference of several orders of magnitude, in favor of usd.
    - boc 6y ago
      Fair - it's hard to get accurate info on the sum value of the transactions. Even if every transaction was a full bitcoin, it's still only $17B per day. Or still just six tenths of one percent of what JPM processes daily.
      - borg_ 6y ago
        No it's not hard to get some idea of the transaction volume, at least on chain transactions: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volu.... It stands though that it's orders of magnitudes less than USD. We will never find out such data for USD anyway, where do you verify for yourself that the claimed 2.7T is accurate?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
chews 6y ago
or it's probably why the NSA published a paper on digital cash, cause bailing out banks and reinsurance companies is really fun and a positive for future generations.
oceanghost 6y ago
If the CIA wants you to believe something... you'd be much better off not doing that. Three letter agencies always support existing power structures.
- herbst 6y ago
  No obviously Bitcoin is bad mkey. Because unregulated money is basically the same as illegal money. Or so. The answers in here are horribly sad really.
jude- 6y ago
This is why I don't see the USA banning Bitcoin anytime soon. Using it makes it all too easy to catch nefarious activity.
hellow0rldz 6y ago
It doesn't matter. Making a wire payment or paying with a card is also surveilled and archived until the end of time. BitCoin's major purpose is as a hedge to massive fiat printing.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  No, they are recorded. The government needs a warrant after convincing a judge that there is probable cause that you have committed a crime before they can pull your bank records. When you use crypto, you're just broadcasting every transaction to the world, so they can just watch. Using bitcoin to avoid government surveillance is like saving your passport on a billboard to avoid hackers.
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    Would a government need a warrant to pull records from an exchange to connect it to a real identity? The usual way bitcoin payments are traceable are due to crypto-fiat exchanges requiring that information (AML & KYC regulations). Wouldn't that make it effectively equivalent?
    - frollo 6y ago
      Only if they can't get you with public information. Suppose that your transactions reveal enough about you to allow the government to profile you, arrange a stake out (and thus get you in another way) or something like that. Or you could have left some trace in a direction which is not that much protected (like you bought something physical which has been delivered to you).
  - schoen 6y ago
    > The government needs a warrant after convincing a judge that there is probable cause that you have committed a crime before they can pull your bank records. Unfortunately, transaction records like financial records are currently afforded a very low level of legal protection in the U.S., so the "warrant" and "probable cause" parts don't describe current practice. (That would be the case for a telephone wiretap, or a search of your home, but not for access to your financial records.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine One thing that I don't think the press ever managed to chase down -- following the Snowden revelations -- is the rumor that there was also a "bulk financial records program" which would have involved intelligence agencies and/or law enforcement getting access to search all bank transactions, without any individualized suspicion. (Recall that one thing Snowden revealed is that there was a bulk telephone records program, in which telephone metadata was turned over to the government in bulk, without individualized suspicion, which the government justified in part due to the third-party doctrine.) In the government's view, the third-party doctrine means that it's never a fourth amendment violation if the government compels access to most kinds of transaction data in the possession of some kind of service provider or intermediary. (Some of those kinds of data may have higher levels of statutory protection but the government's position, as I understand it, has been that it's not an infringement of your fourth amendment rights even if those protections are circumvented or ignored.)
siruncledrew 6y ago
Bitcoin has become more successful as an investment or store-of-value than as an "anonymous" payment option. Even within the cryptos, there are already better options than Bitcoin if someone is worried about transaction monitoring.
dcolkitt 6y ago
As far as I can tell, hundreds of millions in drugs and contraband are regularly transacted using Bitcoin. Billions in global capital controls and taxes are evaded every day with Bitcoin. The fraction of black market participants who are revealed on the basis of "chain analysis" is still a rounding error. It all depends what your threat model is. Bitcoin can be traced by sophisticated nation state actors at the cost of tens of millions per intercepted target. If I was Osama bin Laden or El Chapo or a guy who personally pissed off Putin, I probably wouldn't rely on it. But if I was a local drug kingpin in Baltimore, or a corrupt mid-level CCP official, or a Cypriot corporate money launderer, then Bitcoin deanonymization is probably a small risk in the scheme of things. Certainly orders of magnitude less risk than using the traditional banking system.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  It can be pretty anonymous too. You can use fiat to buy mining hardware and then it's pretty hard to connect an identity to a wallet if you're careful. Don't you eventually need fiat? Yes, so you have someone sell NFTs to those untraceable wallets and now you have a legit income stream as an artist. Pay the tax in the place you want your money to end up and you really only need like one person in your destination country to clean as much as you'd like.
  - dragonelite 6y ago
    You pretty much need to go through a Know your customer(KYC) process to really trade in crypto. At least here in western Europe i had to upload a Id doc, I don't mind it because saving money costs me money, buying satoshis earns me money. Given cryptos nature of being a public ledger and there more then enough compute power available everything can probably be traced and backtracked in real-time.
    - atat7024 6y ago
      > You pretty much need to go through a Know your customer(KYC) process to really trade in crypto KuCoin? Binance?
antpls 6y ago
How I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong : All transactions are visible, sure, but Bitcoin also enables mass dilution and mass money washing. Let's say there is a bitcoin address A on which you have identified that 50% of the Bitcoins are legit, and 50% came from a suspicious flagged address B. Now what? Do you also flag A as "suspicious". What if A also made thausands other payments, do you flag all the recipients as suspicious? Let's say you are drastic and your external system only allows payments from the addresses with a 100% verifiable and clean history. Now all I have to do as an attacker is to make a payment to your address from a flagged address I own, and all your bitcoins are also now flagged for life. You quickly end up flagging the whole address base as suspicious, because there is no way to : - block deposit - differentiate Bitcoin X from Bitcoin Z I guess something like smart contracts could change the rules, but that would be a completely new network and token Or am I missing something ?
- rax0m 6y ago
  You are missing the concept of a UTXO, but that's a bit besides the point. You are in general correct. However, there is currently no market price difference for "untainted coins". Some are expecting a secondary market to appear, some are not. A lot to uncover in this area!
- throw4738 6y ago
  That is not how anti money laundering works. Person has to prove their income is clean, there is no presumption of innocence.
jokoon 6y ago
You don't even have to interact with a bank to clean money with bitcoin: https://i.imgur.com/Qd7h2yu.png https://i.imgur.com/Qd7h2yu.png
indigoblue300 6y ago
MWEB on Litecoin solves this by adding Financial Confidentiality (Fungibility) as an extension block. The code is complete and is open for review. https://litecoin-foundation.org/mweb-code-complete/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/mweb-code-complete/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/the-battle-for-sound-money/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/the-battle-for-sound-money/
- lawn 6y ago
  What Litecoin provides is far from what Monero provides. And confidentiality isn't the same as fungibility. To be fungible all transactions need protection, so it cannot be opt-in. This is what Monero provides.
  - indigoblue300 6y ago
    There's always a tradeoff. MWEB allows for scalability whereas Monero won't be able to handle the same amount of traffic MWEB or Litecoin can handle. Also, for people to use XMR, they'll need access to XMR and they do not have that in the U.S.
    - lawn 6y ago
      You can buy Monero from Kraken in the US just fine. Also, Monero actually focused on on-chain scaling with it's dynamic blocksize, as opposed to Litecoin that follows the Bitcoin way of second layer scaling.
  - knocte 6y ago
    Being opt-in is a feature, not a bug. Because of Monero's privacy not being opt-in, there are so many exchanges that simply blacklist it. But being a hybrid coin will mean that you can use privacy when transacting, but can disable privacy when you need to interact with exchanges. > What Litecoin provides is far from what Monero provides. Monero's privacy technology is a bit more nuanced than Litecoin, but again, this is also a feature, not a bug. Litecoin's technology being simple means it's more difficult to get wrong, and also allows for scalability overhaul improvements, which cannot be applied to Monero (read the MimbleWimble whitepaper for more info on this).
zelly 6y ago
Headline is misleading. The whitepaper by the CIA director emphasizes that the US should not outlaw crypto, because China would then capture all the value that the US would miss out on.
Alkhwarizmi 6y ago
CIA research operation at its fullest extent! Nice try but people aren’t falling for this
itsdsmurrell 6y ago
Try Bitcoin Cash, they have https://cashfusion.org https://cashfusion.org... it's like a mixer you can switch on in your wallet and because the fees are what they are meant to be (according to Satoshi - https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/), the mixing cost only a few pennies.
- frankenst1 6y ago
  BCH is a scam. Not because they advertise that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH when they expected Bitcoin.
ccortes 6y ago
I think people underestimate how easy it is to launder money with more traditional methods and overestimated how easy it is with crypto.
cwkoss 6y ago
Also, remember the blockchain is effectively permanent. Even if many of these activities cannot be identified today, it seems likely that many peoples transactions will be unmasked at some point in time. I would not recommend using bitcoin for illegal or embarassing activity.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
da_big_ghey 6y ago
And yes mayebe, but not in this case for every crypto. We all should ought to be using Monero, escape digital financail system that government can be tracking every transaction. There ought not to be any way for tracking of transaction for to be happening.
gandalfian 6y ago
I wonder if we will get blacklisted individual bitcoins that no regulated firm will be allowed to accept.
Lordarminius 6y ago
I am constantly amazed by the Luddite comments on hacker News everytime crypto comes up. Nobody with a modicum of opsec knowledge would even use Bitcoin for secure, secret transactions. There are better alternatives Get over your conservatism and accept the fact that crypto is the future.
idownvoted 6y ago
Gee, who would have thunk?! A complete transaction history for users which were attracted by alleged anonymity?! The ability to extort even if you just traded with someone who’ve traded with someone shady? The possibility to thread ceasing of wealth without one judge approval needed? Ability to manipulate the price by extorting whales? The ability to extort miners because all of them store and share child pornography via the blockchain? What could possibly go wrong...
rmtech 6y ago
If you are using Bitcoin for privacy you are an idiot. Dedicated privacy coins like ZCash have existed for years, and even more modern systems like Aztec are on the rise. https://zk.money/ https://zk.money/ Eventually Aztec will allow not just private payments but running arbitrary code on-chain in private. The mainstream is completely clueless.
- Loughla 6y ago
  The mainstream is confused by the sheer number of coins available. For example, I have never heard of zcash or aztek. I have no idea what they're about or how long they've existed, or whether or not they're a scam. I understand there are different uses for all of these coins, vaguely. But I also have no idea which are scams, which are not, and which are good for what I need. Further, I have zero idea where to even start to evaluate those three points, let alone the trading process. And a lot of that issue is because crypto zealots are sort of awful to deal with, because many times they are needlessly condescending. Ask for help in crypto forums, and you get responses such as, "don't be clueless" or "use [insert weirdly named coin here], obviously [zero references to follow this statement]." Also, the number of people shilling various coins is genuinely startling. Too many people have too much invested in too many coins for me to be comfortable that I'm not being scammed. Source: I am as mainstream as it gets with this stuff.
  - Black101 6y ago
    Monero is apparently better then Zcash
- Black101 6y ago
  If I buy Bitcoins using cash, it can be pretty good, privacy-wise...
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Zcash privacy features aren't even on by default. You have to explicitly choose to make private transactions. This isn't good for a coin with Tor-like properties such an anonymity set. In practice, that set will be small enough for users to stand out and be identified.
manishsharan 6y ago
Doesn't anyone else here think that this is a damm good thing. Getting rid of unsavoury characters and thier businesses would be good for Bitcoin in the long run and attract more asset managers to include this in their portfolio.
wpdev_63 6y ago
Does anyone know what's going on with the kovri project that's suppose implement I2p tunneling for monero? It seems like the project stalled and the developer dropped off the face of the earth.
thesuitonym 6y ago
I always wondered about this, and figured I was missing something. If every transaction is recorded for eternity, then tracking funds is just a matter of linking wallets to individuals, which while that may be difficult, it's not impossible. Certainly not with the kind of funds that three letter agencies command. I always assumed the closest you could get to anonymity with any blockchain based coin is to use a burner wallet, and convert it cash as soon as the transaction is complete--but that's just using cash with extra steps.
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  Monero does anonymous transactions.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero
- frollo 6y ago
  And the fact that it's recorded for eternity means that maybe you don't have enough information to link people to the transaction today, but the information will keep accumulating...
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Monero solves this with ring signatures. Every transaction is automatically signed by a lot of wallets and there's no way to tell from which wallet the coins are actually coming from.
grae_QED 6y ago
Wait what? Who has ever been caught from analysing the blockchain? Everyone uses local crypto exchanges to cashout/cashin and burner wallets. It's literally paying/receiving cash but with extra steps.
nikolay 6y ago
Well, of course - it was either started at NSA or by Paul Le Roux, so, neither is a good reason to invest money or energy in this stinky steamy pile.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Ray Dillinger was there in bitcoin's early days. He recently wrote this: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-December/036510.html https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-Decembe... > The pseudonymity of coins being owned by the bearer of some cryptographic key is a failure; > People have been eavesdropping and aggressively analyzing the block chain from day 1. > And the block chain will always be there, it will always be public, and it will always be subject to further analysis. > And we are learning that analysis of that record is sufficient to destroy any pretense of anonymity or pseudonymity.

This is misleading. Crypto is used by most ransomwares nowadays and terrorist groups have embraced crypto as a valid source of financing. That crypto is still a low percentage of overall illicit transactions makes sense, but give it 10 more years and that wont be the case anymore. https://t.co/TFB02c7FEM https://t.co/TFB02c7FEM

berkes 6y ago
That assumes that legitimate use does not also grow. Which is a baseless assumption.

anonytrary 6y ago

That's why Zcash, Dash, Monero, et al. are probably going to pop off. That, or become completely illegal, we'll see... not even sure if that can even be enforced beyond pushing centralized exchanges to delist the coins. Coinbase delisted Ripple a few months ago, and Ripple just 5x'd in the past month, so I'm not sure how effective one-off delisting actually is.

bouncycastle 6y ago
They've already been delisted by exchanges in Australia, although voluntarily, not by law. IMO The whole world has gone mad with the need for surveillance of everything.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  delisting doesn't really change anything. The real threat would be if exchanges started blocking accounts that received BTC deposits from known monero-BTC exchange accounts. Luckily, they can't really do that, since people would be able to poison an arbitrary BTC wallet just by sending them a quantity of BTC laundered via monero. But it'd be a pretty expensive poison pill.
  - ancientworldnow 6y ago
    The monero atomic swap feature means you can go from BTC to XMR without ever even touching an exchange or one of their wallets.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      BTC to XMR, sure. But XMR to BTC is the value proposition -- if you've made a fortune doing something illegal, you'll want to have access to the BTC market somehow. Right now, you can probably do that without being sent to prison. It's a matter of using one of the many conversion websites to go from XMR to BTC, then depositing to your exchange and selling it. (I don't know how you'd explain it on a tax form, but maybe you can think of something clever.) But if exchanges start actively cracking down on any account that deposits BTC in response to XMR transactions (i.e. the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites), they can start putting accounts on hold if those accounts have received large quantities of BTC from any of those XMR-related BTC wallets.
      - varajelle 6y ago
        The atomic swap works both ways. Also with the lightning network you can mix and change different crypto currencies, and it can be really hard to trace the provenance of the coins. Not something an exchange can do automatically. > the exchange maintains a known list of wallets used by those conversion websites Remember that new wallet can be created for each transactions. So even if they'd try to do that, it wouldn't work.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        You can certainly map clusters of BTC wallets. It doesn’t matter if you create a new wallet for that purpose, since those new wallets are contaminated by the transaction history. Basically, from the exchange’s view, they’d bucket the wallets into either “looks like mixing; hold the account” or “seems legit.” Most wallets aren’t used for any high volume transactions; most account holders at Coinbase have no need for that. So it’s certainly possible to map out the network and partition it into known good / known bad categories, and handle the middle ground manually. In other words, yes, XRP is very clever. That’s not the problem. The problem is, you’ll someday find it very hard to convert large quantities of XMR to USD without risking jail time.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  You have exact corect purposes here: no governemint ought to be having surveilance on financial transaction. They are even atempt to removeing cash for to grow surveilance. This is horible and we must have stopping it.
- bruce343434 6y ago
  australia is such a cuckolded nation when it comes to privacy and technology
bawolff 6y ago
Are they really any better? Zcash has performance issues resulting in fewer people using the private features (privacy is about blending into a crowd. Hard to do that if the crowd is small), dash sounds like a fancier version of normal bitcoin coin laundry. Monero is probably the best but still doesn't provide any math based garuntees, so it's hard to know what it really gives. Then again, they dont need to provide privacy, just the preception thereof. (I stopped paying attention to cryptocurrencies a while ago. My opinions may be outdated)
- ianmiers 6y ago
  In terms of protocols, not specific coins, privacy is clearly technically viable. Take Zcash: for its underlying protocol, known as sapling, the performance issues went away. It's about 2.5 seconds to make a fully private transaction on a pixel 3 and you could get it down to 1 second with some optimizations to the underlying circuit. As a coin, Zcash still has privacy adoption problems, but the roots of that aren't some fundamental technical issue: Zcash isn't focusing on usability, leading to the usage problems. That may change. Also, there are a number of projects coming on line using the same privacy tech. Good privacy is feasible, we have the technical protocols. But product-market-fit niche isn't entirely there yet: the problem is few people grasp then need for on chain privacy yet.
  - baby 6y ago
    There’s still the issue that you need to sync to the full history and look at all the outputs to see if they’re yours right? That’s a real challenge as a light client (which most people are).
    - ianmiers 6y ago
      For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money and find the payment. There's even a draft spec for doing it for Zcash. https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a51619d899746b1d35f47790cbee665059c85d22cc12b64fd77c750 https://github.com/zcash/zips/pull/420/files#diff-635022fa4a...
dominostars 6y ago
MobileCoin is notable here as well, as they’re promising privacy and being integrated into signal
- sschueller 6y ago
  What is notable is that the government has an easy target to monitor or get rid of mobile coin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
csomar 6y ago
Decentralized Exchanges are a matter of time. The best the current establishment can do is provide a superior UX for a DEX or on-off ramps to the traditional markets.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  I don’t think we will ever see this. The incentive to modify the code and make it do “evil” things is too high.
  - zelly 6y ago
    We do see it though. There's Uniswap and Bancor on ETH. The trading volumes are in the billions of United States dollars per day. There is also Bisq as a decentralized fiat onramp for BTC and XMR (and soon on-chain atomic swaps). Today it is possible to completely interact with the crypto ecosystem without centralized exchanges. If you're worried about the code changing, you can run e.g. ETH nodes yourself, download the DEX frontends, and run the DEX locally.
    - intotheabyss 6y ago
      Or you can visit uniswap.eth if you have metamask installed since it resolves ENS domains.
    - randomopining 6y ago
      Except how do you go from crypto to USD on a decentralized exchange lol... You don't
      - andxor 6y ago
        https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
  - andxor 6y ago
    Uniswap has more daily volume than Coinbase.
WinstonSmith84 6y ago
Probably Coinbase is going to relist XRP. That was probably to be beyond conform in regard to their IPO and the SEC investigation in Ripple, now settled ... As for Zcash and Monero, yes, these are sensibly some more anonymous cryptos, still nothing as anonymous as some simple bank notes .. :-) Btw, when I see the amount of people thinking that Bitcoin is used (nowadays) for illegal activities, and commenting about it on HN (which has theoretically a more educated audience), this is mind-blowing how little Bitcoin is understood at the moment. It feels like our governments have made a really good job of disinformation
- Laforet 6y ago
  Once upon a time you could actually buy goods and services like pizza and games with BTC, nowadays the most likely reason for an average person to buy bitcoin is to pay the ransom for their locked up computer. Without a legitimate use case (selling your nintendo switch to somebody in venezuela does not count) BTC will be forever associated with the small scale crime scene.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    This is definitely not true. The most likely reason for someone to buy BTC is speculation. Darknet markets and ransomware volume is tiny in comparison.
  - xur17 6y ago
    You can still buy pizza and games with BTC. If anything, I'd argue that the market for this has increased.
  - WinstonSmith84 6y ago
    BTC was never meant to be used to purchase groceries (transaction fees + limitation on the number of tx/s). There are other cryptos which (could) do that very well, however. But large bank transfer may be convenient with Bitcoin: have you ever purchased a used car, not for $500USD, but for $10k+? Arguably, it's a legal, but definitely an edge case. Just giving an example :-) Speculation is one thing, but BTC is going nowhere and in a world hit by an incoming significant inflation, many have understood that Bitcoin is simply an easy place where to safeguard your wealth if the outlook is at least +5 years, not days / months. That's why people buy Bitcoins at the moment.
MrMan 6y ago
I think it is good for criminals to have a separate system like monero. Then law enforcement and intelligence can attack it without worries about disrupting the legitimate system.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Out of all privacy coins, Monero is the only one with a future.
- capableweb 6y ago
  One-liner with no arguments for why you believe so, great comment! Why don't you tell us why this is a "one-takes-it-all" market and why specifically Monero?
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Because Monero's the only coin that can't actually be traced or tainted. Looks like even government agencies haven't been able to break it yet. It's also actually useful as currency due to low transaction fees.

busymom0 6y ago

Slightly off topic but SEC is going after small competition to YouTube LBRY and Odysee platform by claiming their LBRY Credits are "securities" and thus need to be regulated. If this happens to LBRY, then other cryptocurrencies will be next. https://helplbrysavecrypto.com/faq https://helplbrysavecrypto.com/faq Video summaries: > SEC vs. LBRY Could be DEVASTATING! Viva & Barnes HIGHLIGHT: https://youtu.be/kB_TrpRikq8 https://youtu.be/kB_TrpRikq8 > SEC vs. LBRY Crypto Lawsuit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JyIPFuUbWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JyIPFuUbWg

vmception 6y ago
that's okay, the market hasn't seemed to really care about any of that. its been a Sword of Damocles hanging over many tokens heads, and sometimes they've dropped pretty hard on the teams and the market shrugged it off. the issue is that actual unregistered securities can't be traded by custodial exchanges, and registered securities have to be traded by broker dealers, and none of that exists or has any liquidity in crypto land. but the autonomous non-custodial exchanges have more volume and liquidity now anyway so nobody cares.
null0pointer 6y ago
Is LBRY a registered business? I don't see how SEC could regulate cryptos much more than they already do. I suppose the could force US exchanges to disable withdrawals like the Chinese government did a while ago for Chinese exchanges. Other than that there's nothing they can do regulation wise.
ve55 6y ago
There are very specific requirements with strong precedent (see: Howey Test https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp) that must be met to be considered a security, and it is very clear that currencies like Bitcoin don't meet them. If various bodies wish to regulate it, there are plenty easier and stronger tools to use than securities laws. With that said, many companies involved in minting their own cryptocurrency (primarily during the IPO craze a few years ago) did sell unregistered securities in plain sight, often committing massive fraud alongside it, and it's no surprise that the SEC has been catching up with it over the last few years.

legerdemain 6y ago

A number of voices from government and surveillance circles, like Thiel et al, have come forward lately to caution about "big problems" with Bitcoin. I have to conclude that Bitcoin is actually winning, and these people are just spreading FUD in an effort to crush something they can't control.

boc 6y ago
Just to bring some perspective, JP Morgan alone transfers the equivalent of the U.S. real gross domestic product each week. $2.8T per day, just by one bank. Bitcoin+all of crypto combined is nowhere close to that scale. Bitcoin sees around 300k transactions per day. It's miniscule.
- er4hn 6y ago
  Minor nit, but you are comparing amount transferred vs number of transactions. Yes, there is a difference of several orders of magnitude, in favor of usd.
  - boc 6y ago
    Fair - it's hard to get accurate info on the sum value of the transactions. Even if every transaction was a full bitcoin, it's still only $17B per day. Or still just six tenths of one percent of what JPM processes daily.
    - borg_ 6y ago
      No it's not hard to get some idea of the transaction volume, at least on chain transactions: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volu.... It stands though that it's orders of magnitudes less than USD. We will never find out such data for USD anyway, where do you verify for yourself that the claimed 2.7T is accurate?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

chews 6y ago

or it's probably why the NSA published a paper on digital cash, cause bailing out banks and reinsurance companies is really fun and a positive for future generations.

oceanghost 6y ago

If the CIA wants you to believe something... you'd be much better off not doing that. Three letter agencies always support existing power structures.

herbst 6y ago
No obviously Bitcoin is bad mkey. Because unregulated money is basically the same as illegal money. Or so. The answers in here are horribly sad really.

jude- 6y ago

This is why I don't see the USA banning Bitcoin anytime soon. Using it makes it all too easy to catch nefarious activity.

hellow0rldz 6y ago

It doesn't matter. Making a wire payment or paying with a card is also surveilled and archived until the end of time. BitCoin's major purpose is as a hedge to massive fiat printing.

hannasanarion 6y ago
No, they are recorded. The government needs a warrant after convincing a judge that there is probable cause that you have committed a crime before they can pull your bank records. When you use crypto, you're just broadcasting every transaction to the world, so they can just watch. Using bitcoin to avoid government surveillance is like saving your passport on a billboard to avoid hackers.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  Would a government need a warrant to pull records from an exchange to connect it to a real identity? The usual way bitcoin payments are traceable are due to crypto-fiat exchanges requiring that information (AML & KYC regulations). Wouldn't that make it effectively equivalent?
  - frollo 6y ago
    Only if they can't get you with public information. Suppose that your transactions reveal enough about you to allow the government to profile you, arrange a stake out (and thus get you in another way) or something like that. Or you could have left some trace in a direction which is not that much protected (like you bought something physical which has been delivered to you).
- schoen 6y ago
  > The government needs a warrant after convincing a judge that there is probable cause that you have committed a crime before they can pull your bank records. Unfortunately, transaction records like financial records are currently afforded a very low level of legal protection in the U.S., so the "warrant" and "probable cause" parts don't describe current practice. (That would be the case for a telephone wiretap, or a search of your home, but not for access to your financial records.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine One thing that I don't think the press ever managed to chase down -- following the Snowden revelations -- is the rumor that there was also a "bulk financial records program" which would have involved intelligence agencies and/or law enforcement getting access to search all bank transactions, without any individualized suspicion. (Recall that one thing Snowden revealed is that there was a bulk telephone records program, in which telephone metadata was turned over to the government in bulk, without individualized suspicion, which the government justified in part due to the third-party doctrine.) In the government's view, the third-party doctrine means that it's never a fourth amendment violation if the government compels access to most kinds of transaction data in the possession of some kind of service provider or intermediary. (Some of those kinds of data may have higher levels of statutory protection but the government's position, as I understand it, has been that it's not an infringement of your fourth amendment rights even if those protections are circumvented or ignored.)

siruncledrew 6y ago

Bitcoin has become more successful as an investment or store-of-value than as an "anonymous" payment option. Even within the cryptos, there are already better options than Bitcoin if someone is worried about transaction monitoring.

dcolkitt 6y ago

As far as I can tell, hundreds of millions in drugs and contraband are regularly transacted using Bitcoin. Billions in global capital controls and taxes are evaded every day with Bitcoin. The fraction of black market participants who are revealed on the basis of "chain analysis" is still a rounding error. It all depends what your threat model is. Bitcoin can be traced by sophisticated nation state actors at the cost of tens of millions per intercepted target. If I was Osama bin Laden or El Chapo or a guy who personally pissed off Putin, I probably wouldn't rely on it. But if I was a local drug kingpin in Baltimore, or a corrupt mid-level CCP official, or a Cypriot corporate money launderer, then Bitcoin deanonymization is probably a small risk in the scheme of things. Certainly orders of magnitude less risk than using the traditional banking system.

dumbfoundded 6y ago
It can be pretty anonymous too. You can use fiat to buy mining hardware and then it's pretty hard to connect an identity to a wallet if you're careful. Don't you eventually need fiat? Yes, so you have someone sell NFTs to those untraceable wallets and now you have a legit income stream as an artist. Pay the tax in the place you want your money to end up and you really only need like one person in your destination country to clean as much as you'd like.
- dragonelite 6y ago
  You pretty much need to go through a Know your customer(KYC) process to really trade in crypto. At least here in western Europe i had to upload a Id doc, I don't mind it because saving money costs me money, buying satoshis earns me money. Given cryptos nature of being a public ledger and there more then enough compute power available everything can probably be traced and backtracked in real-time.
  - atat7024 6y ago
    > You pretty much need to go through a Know your customer(KYC) process to really trade in crypto KuCoin? Binance?

antpls 6y ago

How I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong : All transactions are visible, sure, but Bitcoin also enables mass dilution and mass money washing. Let's say there is a bitcoin address A on which you have identified that 50% of the Bitcoins are legit, and 50% came from a suspicious flagged address B. Now what? Do you also flag A as "suspicious". What if A also made thausands other payments, do you flag all the recipients as suspicious? Let's say you are drastic and your external system only allows payments from the addresses with a 100% verifiable and clean history. Now all I have to do as an attacker is to make a payment to your address from a flagged address I own, and all your bitcoins are also now flagged for life. You quickly end up flagging the whole address base as suspicious, because there is no way to : - block deposit - differentiate Bitcoin X from Bitcoin Z I guess something like smart contracts could change the rules, but that would be a completely new network and token Or am I missing something ?

rax0m 6y ago
You are missing the concept of a UTXO, but that's a bit besides the point. You are in general correct. However, there is currently no market price difference for "untainted coins". Some are expecting a secondary market to appear, some are not. A lot to uncover in this area!
throw4738 6y ago
That is not how anti money laundering works. Person has to prove their income is clean, there is no presumption of innocence.

jokoon 6y ago

You don't even have to interact with a bank to clean money with bitcoin: https://i.imgur.com/Qd7h2yu.png https://i.imgur.com/Qd7h2yu.png

indigoblue300 6y ago

MWEB on Litecoin solves this by adding Financial Confidentiality (Fungibility) as an extension block. The code is complete and is open for review. https://litecoin-foundation.org/mweb-code-complete/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/mweb-code-complete/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/the-battle-for-sound-money/ https://litecoin-foundation.org/the-battle-for-sound-money/

lawn 6y ago
What Litecoin provides is far from what Monero provides. And confidentiality isn't the same as fungibility. To be fungible all transactions need protection, so it cannot be opt-in. This is what Monero provides.
- indigoblue300 6y ago
  There's always a tradeoff. MWEB allows for scalability whereas Monero won't be able to handle the same amount of traffic MWEB or Litecoin can handle. Also, for people to use XMR, they'll need access to XMR and they do not have that in the U.S.
  - lawn 6y ago
    You can buy Monero from Kraken in the US just fine. Also, Monero actually focused on on-chain scaling with it's dynamic blocksize, as opposed to Litecoin that follows the Bitcoin way of second layer scaling.
- knocte 6y ago
  Being opt-in is a feature, not a bug. Because of Monero's privacy not being opt-in, there are so many exchanges that simply blacklist it. But being a hybrid coin will mean that you can use privacy when transacting, but can disable privacy when you need to interact with exchanges. > What Litecoin provides is far from what Monero provides. Monero's privacy technology is a bit more nuanced than Litecoin, but again, this is also a feature, not a bug. Litecoin's technology being simple means it's more difficult to get wrong, and also allows for scalability overhaul improvements, which cannot be applied to Monero (read the MimbleWimble whitepaper for more info on this).

zelly 6y ago

Headline is misleading. The whitepaper by the CIA director emphasizes that the US should not outlaw crypto, because China would then capture all the value that the US would miss out on.

Alkhwarizmi 6y ago

CIA research operation at its fullest extent! Nice try but people aren’t falling for this

itsdsmurrell 6y ago

Try Bitcoin Cash, they have https://cashfusion.org https://cashfusion.org... it's like a mixer you can switch on in your wallet and because the fees are what they are meant to be (according to Satoshi - https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/), the mixing cost only a few pennies.

frankenst1 6y ago
BCH is a scam. Not because they advertise that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH when they expected Bitcoin.

ccortes 6y ago

I think people underestimate how easy it is to launder money with more traditional methods and overestimated how easy it is with crypto.

cwkoss 6y ago

Also, remember the blockchain is effectively permanent. Even if many of these activities cannot be identified today, it seems likely that many peoples transactions will be unmasked at some point in time. I would not recommend using bitcoin for illegal or embarassing activity.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

da_big_ghey 6y ago

And yes mayebe, but not in this case for every crypto. We all should ought to be using Monero, escape digital financail system that government can be tracking every transaction. There ought not to be any way for tracking of transaction for to be happening.

gandalfian 6y ago

I wonder if we will get blacklisted individual bitcoins that no regulated firm will be allowed to accept.

Lordarminius 6y ago

I am constantly amazed by the Luddite comments on hacker News everytime crypto comes up. Nobody with a modicum of opsec knowledge would even use Bitcoin for secure, secret transactions. There are better alternatives Get over your conservatism and accept the fact that crypto is the future.

idownvoted 6y ago

Gee, who would have thunk?! A complete transaction history for users which were attracted by alleged anonymity?! The ability to extort even if you just traded with someone who’ve traded with someone shady? The possibility to thread ceasing of wealth without one judge approval needed? Ability to manipulate the price by extorting whales? The ability to extort miners because all of them store and share child pornography via the blockchain? What could possibly go wrong...

rmtech 6y ago

If you are using Bitcoin for privacy you are an idiot. Dedicated privacy coins like ZCash have existed for years, and even more modern systems like Aztec are on the rise. https://zk.money/ https://zk.money/ Eventually Aztec will allow not just private payments but running arbitrary code on-chain in private. The mainstream is completely clueless.

Loughla 6y ago
The mainstream is confused by the sheer number of coins available. For example, I have never heard of zcash or aztek. I have no idea what they're about or how long they've existed, or whether or not they're a scam. I understand there are different uses for all of these coins, vaguely. But I also have no idea which are scams, which are not, and which are good for what I need. Further, I have zero idea where to even start to evaluate those three points, let alone the trading process. And a lot of that issue is because crypto zealots are sort of awful to deal with, because many times they are needlessly condescending. Ask for help in crypto forums, and you get responses such as, "don't be clueless" or "use [insert weirdly named coin here], obviously [zero references to follow this statement]." Also, the number of people shilling various coins is genuinely startling. Too many people have too much invested in too many coins for me to be comfortable that I'm not being scammed. Source: I am as mainstream as it gets with this stuff.
- Black101 6y ago
  Monero is apparently better then Zcash
Black101 6y ago
If I buy Bitcoins using cash, it can be pretty good, privacy-wise...
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Zcash privacy features aren't even on by default. You have to explicitly choose to make private transactions. This isn't good for a coin with Tor-like properties such an anonymity set. In practice, that set will be small enough for users to stand out and be identified.

manishsharan 6y ago

Doesn't anyone else here think that this is a damm good thing. Getting rid of unsavoury characters and thier businesses would be good for Bitcoin in the long run and attract more asset managers to include this in their portfolio.

wpdev_63 6y ago

Does anyone know what's going on with the kovri project that's suppose implement I2p tunneling for monero? It seems like the project stalled and the developer dropped off the face of the earth.

thesuitonym 6y ago

I always wondered about this, and figured I was missing something. If every transaction is recorded for eternity, then tracking funds is just a matter of linking wallets to individuals, which while that may be difficult, it's not impossible. Certainly not with the kind of funds that three letter agencies command. I always assumed the closest you could get to anonymity with any blockchain based coin is to use a burner wallet, and convert it cash as soon as the transaction is complete--but that's just using cash with extra steps.

RealStickman_ 6y ago
Monero does anonymous transactions.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero
frollo 6y ago
And the fact that it's recorded for eternity means that maybe you don't have enough information to link people to the transaction today, but the information will keep accumulating...
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Monero solves this with ring signatures. Every transaction is automatically signed by a lot of wallets and there's no way to tell from which wallet the coins are actually coming from.

grae_QED 6y ago

Wait what? Who has ever been caught from analysing the blockchain? Everyone uses local crypto exchanges to cashout/cashin and burner wallets. It's literally paying/receiving cash but with extra steps.

nikolay 6y ago

Well, of course - it was either started at NSA or by Paul Le Roux, so, neither is a good reason to invest money or energy in this stinky steamy pile.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Ray Dillinger was there in bitcoin's early days. He recently wrote this: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-December/036510.html https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2020-Decembe... > The pseudonymity of coins being owned by the bearer of some cryptographic key is a failure; > People have been eavesdropping and aggressively analyzing the block chain from day 1. > And the block chain will always be there, it will always be public, and it will always be subject to further analysis. > And we are learning that analysis of that record is sufficient to destroy any pretense of anonymity or pseudonymity.