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There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals. In reality, the block chain is public (and all of its transactions inside... that is

There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals. In reality, the block chain is public (and all of its transactions inside... that is how distributed ledger consensus is achieved among miners) and the on-ramps and off-ramps between fiat are all logged / tracked, especially Coinbase (since they are taking the "safe route" and playing by all of the rules with governments / regulators). Your last-mile exchange from bitcoin back to USD on Coinbase, for example, is logged and monitored by Coinbase -- furthermore, the bank is incentivized to file Suspicious Activity Reports whenever they see these large wire transfers to the virtual banks used by the exchanges for withdrawing and depositing fiat. So, even privacy coins are tracked in this way (these necessary fiat exchanges). You can basically say the same thing about IRS tracking crypto tax evaders.

klaudius 5y ago
Use Monero
- timbit42 5y ago
  Monero is not completely untraceable either.
  - sedeki 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? I know very little about Monero.
    - LanternLight83 5y ago
      Well, I can't speak for why it might be tracable, but can conversely testify that it has dedicated mechanisms for obfuscating and confusing transaction details such as who sent money, who received it, and how much was transferred- mechanisms which are used by default for every transaction, not just for "private" transactions, creating a cloudy swarm of activity in which you can only really tell that "transactions are happening" without access to (or the intense brute-force effort of obtaining) one of the several private keys involved in any given action. Some ground-laying patents have been filed by CipherTrace, but I think it speaks for itself that the IRS's $625,000.00 bounty on tracing Monero still stands.
  - tmashb 5y ago
    Almost the entire comments mix "crypto" with Bitcoin or "all cryptos are the same" which is factually false. Please explain how different it is in comparison, the thread is flooded with baseless claims. This is analogous to placing your money under the bed vs. in a bank vault, they're both unsafe technically, but the difference is vast.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
But what if he merely sent the Bitcoin from Coinbase to another wallet first - say a brain wallet he knows in his head - and then transfered the Bitcoins to the hitman? Wouldn't that be enough for him to be able to say "no i just bought some weed sorry, jail me for a month. i dont know why that person then went on to try to kill my wife."?
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Yes you can do it with any money. What's your point?
- the_local_host 5y ago
  I suspect there are few real-world examples where "you could just say X" actually works... but in this case the story is that a random "weed dealer" killed not a random person, but a specific person known to the "weed purchaser"? Who would believe that story?
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    How does prosecution prove the payment was connected to the hitman and not the weed? Seems like they'd need to seize the hitman's digital communications, at which point the jig is probably already up.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DennisP 5y ago
      It's "beyond a reasonable doubt," not "beyond all doubt."
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Evidence. A grand jury must look through the evidence and conclude that there is enough there to possibly result in a conviction.
- mindslight 5y ago
cwkoss 5y ago
Yep. The Bitcoin Blockchain is a permanent historical ledger. As time passes and info about who transacted what becomes public, the cost of identifying a transaction decreases. (Assuming Bitcoin is still around) we should assume that over time, the cost to unmask any given btc txn to asymptotically approach $0. Even if you escape the statute of limitations, there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century.
- Out_of_Characte 5y ago
  >the cost to unmask any given btc txn to asymptotically approach $0. Mind you, there are several ways to obfuscate transactions even in the bitcoin network. and there are also privacy focused blockchains to whitewash money
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    All of the 'trustless' tumbling solutions I've seen tend to leave some evidence on the blockchain, it often only dilutes the certainty that a particular input maps to a particular output. IMO, the only "surefire" way to launder bitcoin is traditional money laundering: send a trusted person dirty bitcoins and they send you back bitcoins from a clean legitimate source. Strong incentive for launderer to take the funds and run, so trust is unstable in this model.
    - warkdarrior 5y ago
      But... trustless! /s
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  > there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century. That's all of the internet, forget blockchains.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
mullingitover 5y ago
> There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals. Is this why we've successfully caught every single ransomware operation transacting in crypto?
- vkou 5y ago
  To be fair, you have to look at the enormous number of ransomware operators that are conducting their business in fiat... Humm. I suppose that there aren't very many of them. Perhaps cryptocurrencies do make some forms of criminal enterprises much easier to operate. I'm willing to accept that 'Hitman for hire' might not be one of them, though - mostly because you need a local presence, at which point, taking payment in cash has a number of advantages. It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    People make it out like the fiat conversion step is a big gotcha but criminals make fraudulent bank accounts with stolen/synthetic identities all the time.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Then why are ransomware operators getting paid in Bitcoin? It's not impossible to use the regular banking system for crime. But it's a lot harder, and a lot easier to get caught. A cartel in Mexico with an annual income in billions might be able to bribe or threaten the right people, but some techie running a small call center is going to have a harder time.
  - curryst 5y ago
    Cash requires a known location and/or time, and may involve the client seeing your face if face-to-face trades are made. You still need to be local to perform the assassination, but the time and location are still vague. It's basically "somewhere the person will be at some point in the future". Makes it a lot harder to stage a sting because you can't have people set up everywhere that person will be at all times. We're also not terribly far away from remote assassinations being possible. There was an assassination in Iran that allegedly used a computer to control a machine gun to kill someone. Combine that with a self-driving car, or a remotely operated car, and you've got a hitman mobile. Or the cheap and low-tech route, strapping explosives to drones. The cartels have already started using them, so it's not improbable that you could pilot one across the world. Pay the cartel to set up a drone and give you the credentials to control it and you don't even have to leave your home. > It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash. I don't think that's really true. At the scale of money we're talking about, hiring a courier to handcuff the money to their wrist and fly across the world wouldn't be an excessive cost. The primary downside is the same; there's a known location where the money will be left and picked up.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Sounds like it worked just great for one of the criminals... From TFA "The FBI has not, however, been able to identify the hitman as yet. The reason is almost certainly because the hitman did not use a commercial service like Coinbase, which must comply with know-your-customer laws, for the Bitcoin transactions but instead relied on his own personal wallet—one that did not reveal any information about his identity."
- gumby 5y ago
  I wonder if the hitman is the one who notified the BBC. Seems like a better way to make some money than actually, you know, doing the job. (not implying that the bbc gave him any money)
  - rOOb85 5y ago
    To me, it sounds like BBC knows more then they let on. Could BBC have been running a undercover investigative story? It just seems too unlikely they could get the hitmans bitcoin address without being somehow involved.
- m4x 5y ago
  Only because the criminal hasn't yet tried to use that bitcoin to buy something in the real world. If they try to convert to fiat via an exchange, they can be identified the same way the husband was. If they try to buy products directly without using fiat then it is harder for law enforcement to get the records they need, but still quite possible. They will probably be safe if they never touch the bitcoin, but that entirely defeats the purpose of using it
  - divbzero 5y ago
    Bitcoin is more traceable than cash, but surely creative criminals have worked out a way to launder it?
  - jeppesen-io 5y ago
    > Only because the criminal hasn't yet tried to use that bitcoin to buy something in the real world. An asumption you're making and likely untrue. There are many ways to convert to fiat or skip that step and luander through the dark web
jeppesen-io 5y ago
> There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals It certainly can be safe and pseudo anonymous. Just need to be careful about fiat on/off ramps and maybe use a mixer or two. These things are not hard to do. The person who used Coinbase was either lazy or ignorant
jb775 5y ago
I agree, but think there's still ways to remain truly anonymous if you have the technical ability. Why do you think ransomware groups always accept bitcoin?

klaudius 5y ago

Use Monero

timbit42 5y ago
Monero is not completely untraceable either.
- sedeki 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? I know very little about Monero.
  - LanternLight83 5y ago
    Well, I can't speak for why it might be tracable, but can conversely testify that it has dedicated mechanisms for obfuscating and confusing transaction details such as who sent money, who received it, and how much was transferred- mechanisms which are used by default for every transaction, not just for "private" transactions, creating a cloudy swarm of activity in which you can only really tell that "transactions are happening" without access to (or the intense brute-force effort of obtaining) one of the several private keys involved in any given action. Some ground-laying patents have been filed by CipherTrace, but I think it speaks for itself that the IRS's $625,000.00 bounty on tracing Monero still stands.
- tmashb 5y ago
  Almost the entire comments mix "crypto" with Bitcoin or "all cryptos are the same" which is factually false. Please explain how different it is in comparison, the thread is flooded with baseless claims. This is analogous to placing your money under the bed vs. in a bank vault, they're both unsafe technically, but the difference is vast.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

But what if he merely sent the Bitcoin from Coinbase to another wallet first - say a brain wallet he knows in his head - and then transfered the Bitcoins to the hitman? Wouldn't that be enough for him to be able to say "no i just bought some weed sorry, jail me for a month. i dont know why that person then went on to try to kill my wife."?

me_me_me 5y ago
Yes you can do it with any money. What's your point?
the_local_host 5y ago
I suspect there are few real-world examples where "you could just say X" actually works... but in this case the story is that a random "weed dealer" killed not a random person, but a specific person known to the "weed purchaser"? Who would believe that story?
- cwkoss 5y ago
  How does prosecution prove the payment was connected to the hitman and not the weed? Seems like they'd need to seize the hitman's digital communications, at which point the jig is probably already up.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DennisP 5y ago
    It's "beyond a reasonable doubt," not "beyond all doubt."
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Evidence. A grand jury must look through the evidence and conclude that there is enough there to possibly result in a conviction.
mindslight 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago

Yep. The Bitcoin Blockchain is a permanent historical ledger. As time passes and info about who transacted what becomes public, the cost of identifying a transaction decreases. (Assuming Bitcoin is still around) we should assume that over time, the cost to unmask any given btc txn to asymptotically approach $0. Even if you escape the statute of limitations, there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century.

Out_of_Characte 5y ago
>the cost to unmask any given btc txn to asymptotically approach $0. Mind you, there are several ways to obfuscate transactions even in the bitcoin network. and there are also privacy focused blockchains to whitewash money
- cwkoss 5y ago
  All of the 'trustless' tumbling solutions I've seen tend to leave some evidence on the blockchain, it often only dilutes the certainty that a particular input maps to a particular output. IMO, the only "surefire" way to launder bitcoin is traditional money laundering: send a trusted person dirty bitcoins and they send you back bitcoins from a clean legitimate source. Strong incentive for launderer to take the funds and run, so trust is unstable in this model.
  - warkdarrior 5y ago
    But... trustless! /s
f38zf5vdt 5y ago
> there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century. That's all of the internet, forget blockchains.
- SahAssar 5y ago

mullingitover 5y ago

> There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals. Is this why we've successfully caught every single ransomware operation transacting in crypto?

vkou 5y ago
To be fair, you have to look at the enormous number of ransomware operators that are conducting their business in fiat... Humm. I suppose that there aren't very many of them. Perhaps cryptocurrencies do make some forms of criminal enterprises much easier to operate. I'm willing to accept that 'Hitman for hire' might not be one of them, though - mostly because you need a local presence, at which point, taking payment in cash has a number of advantages. It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  People make it out like the fiat conversion step is a big gotcha but criminals make fraudulent bank accounts with stolen/synthetic identities all the time.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Then why are ransomware operators getting paid in Bitcoin? It's not impossible to use the regular banking system for crime. But it's a lot harder, and a lot easier to get caught. A cartel in Mexico with an annual income in billions might be able to bribe or threaten the right people, but some techie running a small call center is going to have a harder time.
- curryst 5y ago
  Cash requires a known location and/or time, and may involve the client seeing your face if face-to-face trades are made. You still need to be local to perform the assassination, but the time and location are still vague. It's basically "somewhere the person will be at some point in the future". Makes it a lot harder to stage a sting because you can't have people set up everywhere that person will be at all times. We're also not terribly far away from remote assassinations being possible. There was an assassination in Iran that allegedly used a computer to control a machine gun to kill someone. Combine that with a self-driving car, or a remotely operated car, and you've got a hitman mobile. Or the cheap and low-tech route, strapping explosives to drones. The cartels have already started using them, so it's not improbable that you could pilot one across the world. Pay the cartel to set up a drone and give you the credentials to control it and you don't even have to leave your home. > It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash. I don't think that's really true. At the scale of money we're talking about, hiring a courier to handcuff the money to their wrist and fly across the world wouldn't be an excessive cost. The primary downside is the same; there's a known location where the money will be left and picked up.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Sounds like it worked just great for one of the criminals... From TFA "The FBI has not, however, been able to identify the hitman as yet. The reason is almost certainly because the hitman did not use a commercial service like Coinbase, which must comply with know-your-customer laws, for the Bitcoin transactions but instead relied on his own personal wallet—one that did not reveal any information about his identity."

gumby 5y ago
I wonder if the hitman is the one who notified the BBC. Seems like a better way to make some money than actually, you know, doing the job. (not implying that the bbc gave him any money)
- rOOb85 5y ago
  To me, it sounds like BBC knows more then they let on. Could BBC have been running a undercover investigative story? It just seems too unlikely they could get the hitmans bitcoin address without being somehow involved.
m4x 5y ago
Only because the criminal hasn't yet tried to use that bitcoin to buy something in the real world. If they try to convert to fiat via an exchange, they can be identified the same way the husband was. If they try to buy products directly without using fiat then it is harder for law enforcement to get the records they need, but still quite possible. They will probably be safe if they never touch the bitcoin, but that entirely defeats the purpose of using it
- divbzero 5y ago
  Bitcoin is more traceable than cash, but surely creative criminals have worked out a way to launder it?
- jeppesen-io 5y ago
  > Only because the criminal hasn't yet tried to use that bitcoin to buy something in the real world. An asumption you're making and likely untrue. There are many ways to convert to fiat or skip that step and luander through the dark web

jeppesen-io 5y ago

> There's this misconception that bitcoin is private / "safe" for criminals It certainly can be safe and pseudo anonymous. Just need to be careful about fiat on/off ramps and maybe use a mixer or two. These things are not hard to do. The person who used Coinbase was either lazy or ignorant

jb775 5y ago

I agree, but think there's still ways to remain truly anonymous if you have the technical ability. Why do you think ransomware groups always accept bitcoin?