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The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger. Unless a mixing service is involved, you can trace back each transaction to an origin easily. If that origin can be l
by danielbln 11y ago
The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger. Unless a mixing service is involved, you can trace back each transaction to an origin easily. If that origin can be linked to a person (e.g. through a trade service that knows bank details and other personal data) then you are no longer anonymous.
Moving coins around a few times to different wallets/addresses makes plausible deniability easier and the trace harder, but if you are a high profile target, you probably want to be more thorough with obfuscating and/or outright disrupting the path through the blockchain that eventually leads back to you.
A mixing service will basically perform money laundering for you, disrupting the direct path back to your initial transaction.
tl;dr: It can be anonymous, but by default it's not really.
- DaveWalk 11y agoThanks for the detailed followup. Is there any case precedent for prosecuting money laundering like this? It seems to me that the path can still be rebuilt. I guess the criminality depends on the crime and the jurisdiction? (And the law. Obviously I'm not a lawyer, lol.)
- itake 11y agodon't know about the legal side, but from a technical side, the laundering services pool all of their client's money together in one churning pot. Which makes it very difficult to see whose money is actually going where.
- emergentcypher 11y agoEspecially if you move your coins through different wallets a few times to obfuscate, and then consolidate them back into the same wallet where you attempt to convert it into cash... obfuscating the intermediary wallets isn't going to do you much good if it can be shown you control the starting and ending wallets. headdesk