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Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

lancengym.medium.com

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Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#51

Post by RuggedPineapple »

z3c0 wrote: post #34

I found this article to be poorly-written and deliberately inflammatory. I'll gloss over the regular criticism of "stop conflating cryptocurrencies with blockchains". It makes continual leaps from Satoshi Nakamoto's intentions to short-comings of non-BTC cryptocurrencies, and then snowballs this into the tremendously non-sequitur subheading Bitcoin has failed. Cryptocurrencies and DeFi platforms are now more vulnerab…

>Personally, all I see are a string of obvious scams collapsing.

I think you and rational people agree, it's just the rational people see the whole space as a scam, and they're not wrong.

It's been, from it's very start, a Dunning-Kruger trap sold on lies. First it was supposed to be a currency, but was created from the ground up to be deflationary, which is a death knell for a currency and leads to perpetual recession.

Then it was an asset that can only go up, until the price crashed and people realized its intrinsic value is 0 and there is no floor.

Then it was an inflation hedge that would keep you up when markets went down, except it turned out to be largely correlated to the market.

Every use case they come up with is a bag of magic beans with the sole intention of getting you to carry their bags. I've heard it described as digital beanie babies and that moniker is more apt then most could have imagined.

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#52

Post by helf »

“No shit”.

Wait, you mean something that literally tracks any and all actions in a literal chain of history that is immutable is easy to track?!?

You mean that pattern recognition can be applied to even “randomized” in both size, time, and destination of transactions can be done to track like how they can track burner phones?

I’m shocked! Shocked I say!

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#54

Post by jqpabc123 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Functional money is built around trust and consensus. A critical weakness of crypto is that the actors involved are *less* trustworthy than government. And this lack of trust and transparency and oversight; combined with the fact that anyone and his brother can mint their own crypto, makes a general consensus on the value of crypto unlikely.

The lack of trust means that the only thing left to guarantee (to a normal person) that the system is working is transparency.

transparency

Has anyone seen the financial records for Tether?

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#55

Post by BLKNSLVR »

For clarity:

1. Bitcoin addresses are 100% traceable from the first to the last transaction that's ever taken place.

2. Tracing a Bitcoin address to an individual depends on the individual's OpSec.

For example: bank account to exchange to Bitcoin is traceable with the help of the exchange's KYC records, assuming they have them. From there, any further Bitcoin transactions can be traced to an individual. Buying Bitcoin with cash in person may make traceability to an individual more difficult, but then you'd have to trust who you're meeting in person to not take photos / videos or have a meeting place swarming with CCTV, and both parties not already be using individually traceable Bitcoin addresses.

Monero and / or exchanges with little to no KYC (therefore, use at your own risk) may allow for some level of 'cutout' in the traceability. Or tumblers or coin mixers or other shady, questionably trustworthy services.

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#56

Post by Nokinside »

ivanhoe wrote: post #25

In theory traceability is not a problem if you can maintain a complete anonymity of your online persona - which in practice most people can't.

If you own significant sums of money and its completely anonymous, or the origin is untraceable, you can't use it.

Just like drug cartels know how to collect and store anonymous money but find it very hard to use it. Every time you try to buy something expensive or normal financial assets, you have to explain where the money is from or you may lose it.

Try to buy a house with anonymous crypto and find out.

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#57

Post by counttheforks »

louwrentius wrote: post #50
SevenNation wrote: post #41

That's because when most people use "blockchain" or "DeFi" they're using AML/KYC entities that post their transaction logs to public servers. Law enforcement eats this up because it saves them the trouble of getting warrants for investigations. Bad for customers to be sure. Most have no idea what they're doing and have fallen for a scam hook, line, and sinker. They (loudly, incessantly) proclaim to their friends the…

What is the point you are trying to convey?

Don't use AML/KYC entities?

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#58

Post by ehnto »

SevenNation wrote: post #41

That's because when most people use "blockchain" or "DeFi" they're using AML/KYC entities that post their transaction logs to public servers. Law enforcement eats this up because it saves them the trouble of getting warrants for investigations. Bad for customers to be sure. Most have no idea what they're doing and have fallen for a scam hook, line, and sinker. They (loudly, incessantly) proclaim to their friends the…

> Bad for customers to be sure. Most have no idea what they're doing and have fallen for a scam hook, line, and sinker.

I wouldn't call it a scam, it's written into laws we should all be pretty mad about. It's only a matter of time before KYC companies are the only way to engage legally with cryptocurrencies. While I don't think having all your transactions in a public ledger was ever a smart move for your average joe, just one de-anonymizing event and you're out to dry. I think the bigger issue is the ever eroding privacy policy in many countries.

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#59

Post by andsoitis »

tromp wrote: post #33

> Unfortunately, this aspect of his brilliant design was one of the first things to be undermined by subsequent blockchain operators. Many cryptocurrencies that have been created since are unlimited in supply, including some of the most heavily speculated ones like Solana, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. > This is worse than what the central banks have done. No, it's not. Even a coin that is emitted one per second forever is…

Even if a single crypto coin is limited in supply, there's an infinite number of (potential) suppliers of coin.

Re: Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money

#60

Post by Spivak »

superkuh wrote: post #8

Yeah, it's entirely built on the idea that every transaction is known by everyone. I think Lance is a bit confused. Maybe he should look into Monero. The point of Bitcoin is to enable anyone to exchange value with anyone. And it does that very well. When the US justice department declared that credit card companies had to stop processing donations to wikileaks I could still donate through bitcoin.

> When the US justice department declared that credit card companies had to stop processing donations to wikileaks I could still donate through bitcoin.

If any appreciable amount of money was sent this way you would see blacklisting of bitcoin addresses where sending / receiving money from that address would get you in legal trouble. Bitcoin creates a situation where you cannot be physically prevented from sending the money but everyone including the gov’t will know you did it so it’s so it’s not censorship resistant to any gov’t that cares to get a wrench.

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