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That's a huge myth that you can track the money just because the transactions are public. I saw this simple example: Imagine wallets A,B,F,X,Z. A contains you
by ye 13y ago
That's a huge myth that you can track the money just because the transactions are public. I saw this simple example:
Imagine wallets A,B,F,X,Z.
A contains your money.
B contains somebody else's money.
Move the money as follows, 1BTC in each transaction:
A -> F
B -> F
F -> X
F -> Z
Now you have 1BTC in X and in Z, but there's absolutely no way of telling where they came from. All you can say is they came from F. From now on X and Z are anonymous.
And then, you can simply sell bitcoins for cash on localbitcoins. It's pretty untraceable.
- dobbsbob 13y agoExactly, unless they are dumb enough to dump the coins in a major exchange which can 'freeze' the funds nobody will ever be able to trace them. As for the owners being doxxed they already failed opsec day they opened with czech css comments giving away the obscure framework they used. I'm sure they git cloned directly to their boxes on clearnet too.
- rprospero 13y agoThat system only works as long as all parties agree to the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". If one party is willing to take the stance of "guilty until proven innocent", the entire scheme falls apart. For instance, let's say that A wants to send bitcoins stolen from G to X and B wants to send other bitcoins to Z. G simply approaches F and says "You stole my bitcoins. As punishment, I'm going to chain you to a mattress in a 6x6 cell until you confess." That leaves F two choices. F can stand for his principles, keep quiet, and serve as an object lesson to all other potential anonymizers. However, if F doesn't want to slowly go mad from a lack of mental stimulation, then F would probably keep detailed accounting records of each transaction and pass them on to G. G might feel gracious and upgrade F to a 10x10 cell with a window. Granted, most of these options are available with cash, but you don't have the transaction record which shows you who F is. In this way, bitcoin is easier to trace than cash.
- ye 13y agoWell that was just a simple example with round numbers. In reality you will have thousands and thousands of such transactions all going to seemingly random wallets with random amounts, and then to ten thousand different ones, back and forth. They will look like real transactions too. You can't possibly track something like that. Most wallets don't have any names attached to them. And even in this simple example you don't know who F, X and Z are and how to find them. They are just wallet numbers.
- alandarev 13y agoThus, whole bitcoin user base will be thrown into a jail if the Sheep Marketplace owner is smart enough to spend significant time parsing his coins around. Nawww, that is unrealistic, even for FBI.
- Anderkent 13y agoThat's what tumblers do. It only works if both A and B contribute the same sum, of course, and that means if you have 93 million dollars to tumble, you need other people to contribute another 93 million. Which no one will, on such a short notice. Thus you end up owning both A and B, in which case the mixing is useless.
- alandarev 13y agoWhat if extracting one million is enough, and he can do the rest over several years span?