61–70 of 120 posts
How long was the criminal underworld using bitcoin before they learnt it was a public ledger.
How long was the criminal underworld using bitcoin before they learnt it was a public ledger.
Only accept coins that were directly mined by the originating wallet's holder, use a new receiving address for each transaction, and sell BTC for cash in real-life parking-lot transactions.
Doesn't sound practicable.
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…
>Zcash has more advanced crypto
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only accept coins that were directly mined by the originating wallet's holder, use a new receiving address for each transaction, and sell BTC for cash in real-life parking-lot transactions.
> and sell BTC for cash in real-life parking-lot transactions. Doesn't sound practicable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 ?
https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4122695-bitcoin-series-...
This mainly appears to be due to transaction times and high fees.
I’d be interested to see a similar analysis for monero but that’s probably not easily doable due to its privacy features.
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
On the other hand, money can be made from supervision.
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/
This seems exactly the kind of applications Ethereum was meant for; however, is there a dispute resolution organ?
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.
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…
This needs a source because it is not true at all >Zcash has more advanced crypto
I suppose by "advanced" I meant new. It's equally fair to say "not as well validated by crypto researchers".