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Bitcoin: it's the worst because criminals use it to evade authorities. Bitcoin: it's the worst because it's transactions are traceable.

• vlovich123 5y ago
  Both can be true. One public instance of the government putting in the effort doesn’t mean the enforcement application of this scales to all instances.
  • remarkEon 5y ago
    >One public instance of the government putting in the effort They looked at a Blockchain viewer. What was the "effort" they put in?
    • j_walter 5y ago
      Actually the hackers tried very hard to hide their tracks by going through a mixer at least once (from what I've read). With enough effort and tracing you can still determine with pretty good accuracy where those bitcoins ended up though. It's not quite like looking up the blockchain.
• acdha 5y ago
  Both can be true for a period of time: criminals can _believe_ something which is incorrect but that can go a long time before it’s challenged directly enough to break that belief (as we just saw with that secure messaging app). Someone who bought drugs on the small scale might think it’s true because that was their experience and the local police weren’t spending the time to go after people and the national agencies were going after sales volumes 3+ orders of magnitude larger, or simply that they weren’t spending time on the blockchain because they went after some other part of the system. That experience would be actively misleading if they got new policy directives — as we just saw with ransomware going from a nuisance for insurance companies to the President of the United States telling federal investigators to do something about it.