You can definitely do this with bills... You realize when a bank gets robbed the serial numbers are tracked and confiscated when they show up, and often lead to the theives
If someone pays you in cash, do you really look up the serial numbers of all the bills you receive?
Actually, some people do.
There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is.
I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)
Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills
why would I? I mean we still use dollars even though a lot of them are used to buy heroin and hookers
Is that money trapped in the system? The moment they sell to USD that account is now linked to a real person no?
It's more difficult, but not impossible I think: On the Bitcoin side you can "wash" it by mixing it with other coins, or deposit/withdraw it through multiple exchanges. Then on the output side, you can get rid of it through shell companies or through less reputable sites, or into countries that won't extradite criminals. So - it's definitely harder than normal, but I think you could find a way.
Its pretty easy to from a tech perspective to tumble and swap coins or use a combination of both. Not only that but you can swap into different blockchains which have fully anonymous layers. So tracing a path is completely impossible. But there is one significant problem, tumbling and swapping 7.5 Billion is hard to do without creating huge market waves and that will be noticed. So you would spread it over 3-4 years and use a variety of swap/tumblers and it can be done. Eventually you have to cash it out and some off ramps might raise some flags.
Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills
You can definitely do this with bills... You realize when a bank gets robbed the serial numbers are tracked and confiscated when they show up, and often lead to the theives
I saw something like this happen when I was younger (this was pre-web, in the 80s or 90s, so I unfortunately haven't been able to find any online references to it): there was a big bank heist, and the stolen banknotes were new notes which hadn't been put into circulation yet. The ranges of their serial numbers were widely distributed by the press, and for instance cashiers at supermarkets were supposed to verify whether the serial numbers of the banknotes they received matched any of these ranges (since the banknotes hadn't been put into circulation, they were treated similar to counterfeit money: they officially didn't have any value). The country's currency has changed since then (it was the hyperinflation times), so that whole banknote series is no longer valid nowadays.
You just washed part of the BTCs which is now owned by the miner.
That's assuming a BTC miner even agrees to process the transaction. Why would a BTC miner want to deal with the headache of tainted bitcoins? It's such a problem that Marathon Digital Holdings, a major bitcoin miner, has stated they will refuse to process transactions from tainted addresses. In the near future, I expect more mining pools to do the same.
Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills
Is everyone expected to know the addresses by heart? Does software flag them? If so, where does the list of tainted addresses come from?
If someone pays you in cash, do you really look up the serial numbers of all the bills you receive?
Actually, some people do. There are tools like EuroBillTracker ( https://en.eurobilltracker.com/ ) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is. I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)
I played with Where's George? for a few minutes, then got bored. None of these things seem to have enough adoption to make it interesting.
If there were money in it, someone would throw OCR at the problem. Say, attach prizes to certain bills, or finding certain patterns of bills (say, two bills whose serial numbers are mathematically related a certain way).
Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills
You can definitely do this with bills... You realize when a bank gets robbed the serial numbers are tracked and confiscated when they show up, and often lead to the theives