>Money laundering is the process of transforming the profits of crime and corruption into ostensibly "legitimate" assets. >A cryptocurrency tumbler is a service offered to mix potentially identifiable or 'tainted' cryptocurrency funds with others, with the intention of confusing the trail back to the fund's original source. English might not be my native language but I can see lots of parallels. I never actually cons…
One minor difference with Bitcoin is that there are no serial numbers. Every bitcoin is identical to every other bitcoin. The blockchain tracks transaction source, destination, and amount, but there's no way to identify a specific bitcoin. Such a concept is actually meaningless, there are no bitcoins, just transactions. This means that when a mixer or exchange wallet gets the bitcoins they can't be individually track…
Re: Why the feds took down one of Bitcoin’s largest exchanges
#141The bag analogy still works if you remove serial numbers and just say that one of the bags was known to have came from mafia. You still can't identify which of the end receivers was the mafia and the effect is still a 'cleaning' process: dirty and clean go in, only clean (as in clean or dirty but not provably distinguishable from clean) comes out.