Earlier quoted context omitted.
uhhhhh ... that's not what they're talking about. nobody really cares about cocaine and pubes on dollar bills.
I care
[deleted]
The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
21–30 of 236 posts
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#22I can tell one of the ways that is missing in the article. Let's say, you have a lot of Bitcoins and your buddy is a bitcoin miner. You craft your transaction such a way that you put all your coins as transaction fee. You send your transaction only to your buddy. Your buddy picks it up and solves the puzzle afterwards. Fees will be converted to brand new coins.
I don’t think that works at all? Your buddy would have to mine that specific block to get the reward, which is based entirely on chance. You’d also have to spend as much on the POW electricity and hardware to have a chance of getting reward anyway.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#23Why go through all that trouble when regular banks already launder cash for you.
Do explain, because I don't believe you actually know how banks work. Banks will flag up dubious transactions - uncommon large ones, frequent smaller ones, a sudden stop or start in transactions, etc. They've got big fraud (and money laundering) prevention teams on there, currently using machine learning to detect suspicious activity.
I mean there's bound to be laundering going on via banks, but it's risky.
Heard about one guy that tried to get his Bitcoin winnings onto his regular account, his bank wouldn't accept it because they couldn't verify its source. Of course, he managed to open up an account at another bank who accepted it without question, and transferring it to his main account from that bank was also done without question, so it's not exactly consistent.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#24I can tell one of the ways that is missing in the article. Let's say, you have a lot of Bitcoins and your buddy is a bitcoin miner. You craft your transaction such a way that you put all your coins as transaction fee. You send your transaction only to your buddy. Your buddy picks it up and solves the puzzle afterwards. Fees will be converted to brand new coins.
I don’t think that works at all? Your buddy would have to mine that specific block to get the reward, which is based entirely on chance. You’d also have to spend as much on the POW electricity and hardware to have a chance of getting reward anyway.
Yeah unless your buddy is a mining pool, I don’t follow how that would work as well.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#25I can tell one of the ways that is missing in the article. Let's say, you have a lot of Bitcoins and your buddy is a bitcoin miner. You craft your transaction such a way that you put all your coins as transaction fee. You send your transaction only to your buddy. Your buddy picks it up and solves the puzzle afterwards. Fees will be converted to brand new coins.
I don’t think that works at all? Your buddy would have to mine that specific block to get the reward, which is based entirely on chance. You’d also have to spend as much on the POW electricity and hardware to have a chance of getting reward anyway.
If you know you mine blocks regularly (e.g once per day or week), it's entirely doable. It's the miners who chose what transactions go into a block. In this scheme, the transaction is "secret", only one miner received it.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#26I get that money laundering is always linked to criminal activity, but how have we always just accepted the lack of personal privacy when it comes to finance? Privacy is a feature, not a bug; and whilst crypto may not be the way forward, I hope one day we can reach a solution that has both privacy and also safety. The language used by law enforcement is quite alarming, it suggests that they should be privy to ALL tra…
If you don't interfere with money laundering, the criminals eventually acquire enormous wealth, and with it power. They eventually acquire enough power to take over the government. At that point, you're at their mercy, and theorizing about privacy laws becomes a bit pointless.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#27Probably easier for any serious criminal to just deal in cash and make deposits at the big banks, they have a long history of taking cartel money.
Depends on the country. Definitely in the UK if you make a lot of large cash transactions without a good business reason, you'll get scrutiny. This is one of the reasons that common fronts for crime are companies that would be expected to handle a lot of cash :) Also the major advantage of cryptocurencies in crime is their international nature. It means I can sit in a country that has no extradition treaty with the p…
> This is one of the reasons that common fronts for crime are companies that would be expected to handle a lot of cash :)
Or a large amount of smaller companies for which 5K in revenue a month won't look suspicious (I'm thinking of stuff like these small phone (repair) shops, and there was a massage parlor down the road that was open frequently but never saw any customers. Still managed to stay open for years. Maybe that grey Mercedes that parked out in front of it once a month had something to do with it?)
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that works at all? Your buddy would have to mine that specific block to get the reward, which is based entirely on chance. You’d also have to spend as much on the POW electricity and hardware to have a chance of getting reward anyway.
Yeah unless your buddy is a mining pool, I don’t follow how that would work as well.
Yup, for Bitcoin it would mean having the mining power of a big pool, indeed.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#29I can tell one of the ways that is missing in the article. Let's say, you have a lot of Bitcoins and your buddy is a bitcoin miner. You craft your transaction such a way that you put all your coins as transaction fee. You send your transaction only to your buddy. Your buddy picks it up and solves the puzzle afterwards. Fees will be converted to brand new coins.
Is it possible to send out transactions without sending them to the mempool?
yes, you can email it to your miner buddy.
it's possible to spot such transactions if they violate transaction forwarding rules (aka standardness rules) but not consensus rules. for example, a transaction greater than 100kB is not standard but still valid.
Re: The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
#30I get that money laundering is always linked to criminal activity, but how have we always just accepted the lack of personal privacy when it comes to finance? Privacy is a feature, not a bug; and whilst crypto may not be the way forward, I hope one day we can reach a solution that has both privacy and also safety. The language used by law enforcement is quite alarming, it suggests that they should be privy to ALL tra…
I don't think the public cares. And, of course, there are many news articles, like this but also about fiat, that show why 'privacy is bad, ok'; criminals will run rampant if we cannot track everything you do.