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Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

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Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#41

Post by gnaritas »

ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #33
gnaritas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mixers A PC name for money launderers. If you need a money launderer, you should rethink what you're doing.

Are you saying you're 100% comfortable sharing the details of all financial transactions you're a part of with "the world"? Sure, your bank would probably want to inquire about the source of the cash if you were to bring a briefcase of cash to the branch for a deposit. But that would be private information sharing "channel" between you and your bank - both the source of your funds and the fact that you have them in y…

> Are you saying you're 100% comfortable sharing the details of all financial transactions you're a part of with "the world"?

I'm pretty sure I didn't say that, so no.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#42

Post by Karunamon »

gnaritas wrote: post #40
Karunamon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You accused them of money laundering, which is a crime by itself most first world nations. Except that phrase doesn't apply unless another crime has been committed, because it only applies to funds gotten illegally. Make more sense?

Anonymous financial transactions are themselves crimes, they violate KYC laws.

What KYC laws? If I'm running some random business selling widgets, I'm under no obligation to do any such thing.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#43

Post by kristofferR »

I'm weirdly ambivalent about Bitcoin privacy/anonymity. On the one hand I deeply value my privacy, and would personally love it if Bitcoin were fully anonymous.

Yet - I also deeply felt intuitively that the Panama Papers exposed bad behavior. The bad behavior it exposed were people aiming to archive financial privacy.

I can't really reconcile the two beliefs.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#44

Post by jacquesm »

I have no illusions about my privacy when using bitcoin, and privacy is not the reason why I would use it in the first place.

From what I gather the key to bitcoin always was that it was decentralized, not that it was private. And over time even the decentralized has been hollowed out quite a bit.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#45

Post by roel_v »

feral wrote: post #24

This is a nice write-up. That said, I hope this is less of a surprise to people now: I coauthored one of the first pieces of working pointing out basically these same issues back in 2011 - almost 5 years ago: http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.ie/2011/07/bitcoin-is-n... It's interesting to see what perceptions have changed. That there's still confusion shows how hard it is to disseminate information about encryptio…

"It's worth noting that there are more sophisticated tools that could be applied: machine learning or stats methods - but I've not seen them yet. Possibly because its hard to come up with good training datasets"

I think it has more to do with those methods not being 'deterministic' for a broad interpretation of that word. By that I mean, if you're doing de-anonymizing for regulatory purposes, it's a hard sell to convince people 'these transactions are correlated because my neural net, which is a complete black box, says so'.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#46

Post by droffel »

kristofferR wrote: post #43

I'm weirdly ambivalent about Bitcoin privacy/anonymity. On the one hand I deeply value my privacy, and would personally love it if Bitcoin were fully anonymous. Yet - I also deeply felt intuitively that the Panama Papers exposed bad behavior. The bad behavior it exposed were people aiming to archive financial privacy. I can't really reconcile the two beliefs.

There is currently an actively developed alternative cryptocurrency called Monero, that uses the 'Cryptonote Protocol', and has a completely different codebase from Bitcoin.

It uses Ring Signatures and a few other cryptographic tricks to make the currency provably unlinkable and untraceable. In 6 months, the network will hard fork to support what is being called "RingCT", which will hide the amount sent in a transaction, in addition to the sender and the receiver that are hidden at the moment.

If you want to read some more about it, ask all the questions you like on /r/monero, they'll be happy to get as technical as you want.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#47

Post by j15t »

gnaritas wrote: post #40
Karunamon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You accused them of money laundering, which is a crime by itself most first world nations. Except that phrase doesn't apply unless another crime has been committed, because it only applies to funds gotten illegally. Make more sense?

Anonymous financial transactions are themselves crimes, they violate KYC laws.

KYC = Know Your Customer

As the name implies, this law only applies to (financial) businesses and their customers. Most Bitcoin transactions are P2P and hence there is no business/customer relationship and hence there is no KYC law applicable.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#48

Post by j15t »

Kiro wrote: post #38
miscellaneous wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noun, 1. money laundering: Concealing the source of illegally gotten money. Do you have any evidence that suggests that all users of mixers obtained their Bitcoin illegally? This HN post is a criticism of the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. Mixers can improve the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. I don't see how your comment adds to this discussion, unless you think financial privacy is a crime - in which case your s…

Doesn't financial privacy mean tax evasion by default?

If you think it does, then I assume you also want to ban cash?

By the way, that is a valid opinion to have - it's just that not everyone agrees that it optimal in the long run for all personal information to be auditable by a government in real time.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#49

Post by j15t »

gnaritas wrote: post #41
ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you're 100% comfortable sharing the details of all financial transactions you're a part of with "the world"? Sure, your bank would probably want to inquire about the source of the cash if you were to bring a briefcase of cash to the branch for a deposit. But that would be private information sharing "channel" between you and your bank - both the source of your funds and the fact that you have them in y…

> Are you saying you're 100% comfortable sharing the details of all financial transactions you're a part of with "the world"? I'm pretty sure I didn't say that, so no.

You did say that because you said that using a Bitcoin mixer is equivalent to money laundering.

On the Bitcoin network all transactions are public and can be linked to an individual. Without mixers it quite possible that the details of all of your financial transactions will be public.

Re: Bitcoin Users Reveal More Private Information Than They Realize

#50

Post by Kiro »

j15t wrote: post #48
Kiro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't financial privacy mean tax evasion by default?

If you think it does, then I assume you also want to ban cash? By the way, that is a valid opinion to have - it's just that not everyone agrees that it optimal in the long run for all personal information to be auditable by a government in real time.

Well, I live in a country where cash is very uncommon. I can't even remember the last time I saw cash in real life so banning it wouldn't make much difference for me personally.
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