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It seems like this is a boom for law enforcement. One of the fundamental aspects of bitcoin is that every transaction is recorded and publicly view able. In ord
by gizmo686 13y ago
It seems like this is a boom for law enforcement. One of the fundamental aspects of bitcoin is that every transaction is recorded and publicly view able. In order to anonomize your currency you bassicly need to go through a mixing service, which takes bitcoins from a pool of users, and redistributes them back to the same users, but at new accounts, so it would be 'impossible' for someone to follow the money using only the blockchain.
There are two ways around the impossibility. One is to do statistical analysys to try and infer which two accounts are the same person. If you reguarly use the same service, this would likely be quite doable.
The other way around this is to compromise the mixing service (either hacking, or with a warrent).
There is currently research being done to make bitcoin properly annonomous [1]
[1] http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- johnyzee 13y agoI am wondering if mixing services might be illegal. As far as I know there are laws prohibiting attempts to conceal or obscure the source of money. Since almost all methods of acquiring bitcoin lead back to a bank account, it would be trivial to trace anybody putting money into the mixing service and potentially prosecute them under anti-laundering laws. Paying cash for bitcoin (i.e. localbitcoin) is not traceable in this manner, but if you have large amounts of untraceable cash then you have probably already successfully laundered money, and though bitcoin is a more convenient store of value it would not be the tool that enabled it. So I agree, seems regulators should be fine with Bitcoin.
- haakon 13y ago> it would be trivial to trace anybody putting money into the mixing service Not really; you can't tell which bitcoin addresses belong to a mixing service and which ones don't; it's all just transactions from one address to another. You may know the owner of the originating address, but not the receiver. There are also mixing service that run as Tor hidden services just like the illegal marketplaces themselves, so you can't really prosecute those.
- gizmo686 13y agoThey could try using a mixing service themselves. Once they do, they have know that where they sent money is part of the mixing service and can start from their. Not to mention the fact that mixing services likely have statistical properties different from other transactions.
- davorak 13y agoThe mixing service can create as many wallets as it wants, each wallet could be used for one user, for one transfer if necessary too.