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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

#51

Post by vadimberman »

elmar wrote: post #48
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.

And how did it work with the Silk Road?

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#53

Post by dustingetz »

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…

there's also no central point to make money

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#54

Post by 55555 »

bluedino wrote: post #52

Isn't the hard part getting the with real money? Let's say I was going to try to launder a million dollars in cash. How do you get that into an exchange and out of an exchange without setting off a million red flags, at least in the United States?

Darknet vendors have the opposite problem. You can swap with them, sell cash on darknet, or swap with others on localbitcoins.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#55

Post by sametmax »

paulmd wrote: post #10
thisisit wrote: post #9

> Its main competitor, Zcash -- which isn’t known to have a significant criminal following -- can offer even better privacy protection . On zcash, there was this discussion: http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio... which suggested that nearly 31.5% of the hidden transactions in Zcash has some transparent parts to it.

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…

It's not a secret. It's pretty much the opposite of a secret actually.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#56

Post by jatsign »

Monero's big problem, right now, is that the fees are high - around $3. They're working on "Bulletproofs" that will reduce the size of transactions, and hopefully fees, by 80%.

Zcash has more advanced crypto, but it takes nearly a minute to generate a private transaction on a normal computer.

My favorite "privacy" coin is PIVX. It uses the zerocoin protocol and is fast with low fees. Die-hard privacy advocates don't like it because it uses Masternodes, but I consider that a plus from an adoption point of view.

Here's a privacy coin comparison of these & others, if anyone is interested.

https://www.bitcoinbeginner.com/blog/privacy-coin-comparison

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#57

Post by sametmax »

Thank you, bloomberg.com, for giving us news from 6 months ago. I'm glad I have serious traditional media with professionals working to provide me with fresh information and insight.

Tomorrow, they will tell us the amazing discovery on about how the economy of crypto is now influenced by massive master nodes holdings.

Next month: the impact of Macafee tweeting.

Seriouly, how are they still doing money when bloggers give better, fresher, stuff than them ?

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#58

Post by keypusher »

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.

You haven't said anything new and some of what you have said is wrong, which you then make worse by suggesting you called bitcoin's fate 10 days ago. Even the fact that you call it "BC" shows that you are completely unfamiliar with the cryptocurrency domain. Your main point seems to be that criminals don't like btc now because of the increased volatility. But btc's volatility has not increased significantly compared to past years. Doubling or tripling in a few months in not unusual. 40% retracements happen 2-3 times per year. The fact that the price has more zeroes in it now doesn't change the percentages, which is what would matter to someone laundering money. The idea that the market will crash if big players cash out? Perhaps, but you have not provided any evidence that this is happening yet. Have significant amounts of coins moved from large holder's wallets recently? "There are better options out there". Yes, I think anyone with even a passing interest in cryptocurrency has been aware of this fact, as it has been true for years.

Historical volatility: https://bitvol.info/

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#59

Post by jatsign »

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…

Distric0x is a project working on this. Not necessarily for criminal markets, but for decentralized markets.

https://district0x.io/

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#60

Post by radicality »

catamorphismic wrote: post #49
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.

I'm interested too, hope the OP or someone can answer. Also, why does the transaction itself need to be sent over tor? I thought Monero's feature is that you can't tell from a transaction who the recipient is (ring transactions or something?) but maybe I don't understand the end-to-end flow and the math well. What is incriminating when you publish a transaction without tor?
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