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The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#41

Post by lawlessone »

blueprint wrote: post #39
paulmd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: only 3.5% of traffic using z-addrs: The dirty secret of crypto is that there is almost no economy that exists for any of the altcoins, and relatively little even for Bitcoin (which functions as the reserve currency due to its lions' share of the economy). Effectively, by volume most altcoins are held by either miners (who sell immediately), or daytraders who will pump and dump. A very small fraction is held by tr…

You're making big generalizations about lack of usage and economy, and you've provided no citations or verifyable grounds. For example, did you know about https://www.projectcoralreef.com ?

All i see are various online "stores" for buying kitsch band tshirts.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#42

Post by y7 »

phs318u wrote: post #8
phs318u wrote: post #6

Called it (in a rather verbose comment 11 days ago). TLDR: BTC - the mob came, the mob went - XMR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993110

Interesting... two downvotes, no comments. I'd love to know why. Did I come across as snarky? If so, didn't mean to. It's just the timing of this article is so close to my prior speculation on this that I thought it warranted a mention.

More haughty than snarky. If you'd said "I wrote on here before, that I had a feeling this was going to happen because [summary of your main point]. See [link]" then you'd probably have upvotes.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#44

Post by vadimberman »

westmeal wrote: post #40
stephen123 wrote: post #22

How long was the criminal underworld using bitcoin before they learnt it was a public ledger.

I think some criminals are actually still using Bitcoin but not any smart criminals. It always seemed weird to me...

I strongly suspect an average cop is not equipped to take advantage of the bitcoin's vulnerabilities, be it US, Japan, China, or Russia.

Not every criminal handles bajillions, so most won't be investigated by young cyber-savvy hotshots.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#45

Post by vadimberman »

A question to the experts: why don't the criminals use smart contract platforms like Ethereum?

My amateurish take is that, for instance, a smart contract could work as an untraceable distributed Silk Road with escrow and everything else. Because there is no one machine where everything runs, it's impossible to shut down the server; there is nothing that links these transactions together, except for the commonly used Solidity code.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#48

Post by elmar »

vadimberman wrote: post #45

A question to the experts: why don't the criminals use smart contract platforms like Ethereum? My amateurish take is that, for instance, a smart contract could work as an untraceable distributed Silk Road with escrow and everything else. Because there is no one machine where everything runs, it's impossible to shut down the server; there is nothing that links these transactions together, except for the commonly used…

because of the same problem as other contracts the lack of trustworthy Oracles, you need some trusted third-party to confirm what happened on the real world.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#49

Post by catamorphismic »

tribby wrote: post #4

monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly opti…

Why would you need to download the blockchain over Tor? There are many people downloading the blockchain and that in itself does not incriminate you. It seems sufficient to only send out transactions using Tor.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#50

Post by [deleted] »

tribby wrote: post #4

monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly opti…

[deleted]
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