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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

#81

Post by olalonde »

insanitybit wrote: post #28
prvit wrote: post #4

Entirely traceable money is easier to trace than borderline untraceable money? Great.

> The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but…

> The reality is that Satoshi envisioned bitcoin very differently from how things are currently implemented.

That's actually how the majority of Bitcoin wallets operate. I'm not sure what you mean here.

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

#83

Post by acdha »

z3c0 wrote: post #47
convery wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "without telling who the parties are" is more about non-personal identifiers. Similar to how knowing your IP address doesn't really identify you by itself, you need to go through (often several levels of) other parties to get that info. Which in addition is ephemeral, others will be assigned your IP and tracing which requests were made by you vs. someone else is a lot harder than tracing a credit-card.

This seems to be lost on a lot of folks, which I find strange in a tech-centric forum. Bitcoin is perfectly pseudonymous, as it strives to be, and not anonymous, which it has never attempted to be.

The Bitcoin designers did not pretend it was anonymous – it’s obviously not to anyone who looks at the architecture! - but the people selling Bitcoin have loudly lied about this since the beginning, however. If you search here you’ll find like 14 years of people pointing out that it’s easily traced and getting a bunch of word salad from the sales guys in response.

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

#84

Post by nimbius »

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…

The whole article is a plug for Chainalysis, a company that sells its ability to trace crypto transactions to the US government who ironically gave them KYC, the most fundamental and lazy ability to start a business that traces stuff like this.

What I'd like to see Grigg admit to with a straight face is his companies ability to trace monero. his company got the US Government bid for a $625,000 bounty to trace it, and its been two years...so i suspect Grigg's releasing this presser to take some of the heat off the inevitable "no, we cant" he's going to need to admit sooner or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero#Efforts_to_trace_transa...

Updated to reflect the thousands, not mil. bounty.

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

#85

Post by saurik »

insanitybit wrote: post #11
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.

I don't think they're confused, I think the vast majority of people involved in crypto or who are spectators of crypto are confused. I have repeatedly heard that crypto enables "anonymous" transactions for years. Also he literally links the original paper, quoting the part where it talks about transactions being harder to trace. "without telling who the parties are".

Well, "crypto" does allow that--and has for years!--using zero-knowledge proofs (as in Zcash), at least within some bounds (that I would say are quite reasonable for conversational purposes... hell: someone in the government seems to think this stuff works, hence the sanctions on Tornado Cash); Bitcoin, one very specific technology from crypto, however, does not.

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

#86

Post by woodruffw »

nimbius wrote: post #84
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…

The whole article is a plug for Chainalysis, a company that sells its ability to trace crypto transactions to the US government who ironically gave them KYC, the most fundamental and lazy ability to start a business that traces stuff like this. What I'd like to see Grigg admit to with a straight face is his companies ability to trace monero. his company got the US Government bid for a $625,000 bounty to trace it, and…

$625,000, not million.

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

#87

Post by zaphar »

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…

The modern monetary system used to have all of the same obvious scams. They made participating in any economic activity risky and depressed local as well as global economic activity as a result. None of these scams are new and the regulations and tools that crypto is attempting to get away from were created as a response to these scams in the past.

To my mind Crypto has not yet made the case that it is better than the current system and the extreme impact that all these scams have on the currencies they are run on, e.g. high volatility in price, indicates that they are substantially worse as a currency than the US dollar.

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

#88

Post by acdha »

jonhohle wrote: post #61
rtkwe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is the fundamental problem, the only benefit you get with a blockchain is you know the data hasn't been altered from the original but there's no guarantee the data originally entered was correct. All the pitches about tracking shipments have the same issue, shipping companies already do most of that without blockchain and the main issue of people lying to the computers isn't solved by adding a chain to the…

Why is blockchain needed for that and not any other immutable ledger?

It’s not, but if you say that you’re also saying that the people who’ve already put a lot of money into the system won’t get rich reselling their tokens.

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

#89

Post by rtkwe »

jonhohle wrote: post #61
rtkwe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is the fundamental problem, the only benefit you get with a blockchain is you know the data hasn't been altered from the original but there's no guarantee the data originally entered was correct. All the pitches about tracking shipments have the same issue, shipping companies already do most of that without blockchain and the main issue of people lying to the computers isn't solved by adding a chain to the…

Why is blockchain needed for that and not any other immutable ledger?

It's not needed that's my point, the proposals for blockchain in most instances are best served by a WORM database and even that doesn't solve the actual issue of lying to the machine. The proponents all have a vested interest in something making their tokens worth while or at least bringing in new money so they can actually cash out. That's why NFTs exploded they were a great way to bring in new real money to allow people who were *coin rich to cash out to real usable money.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

simonh wrote: post #78
RektBoy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell him about Monero bruuuh :D

Don't tell the crypto Bruhs about the several vulnerabilities already found in the Monero anonnymisation system. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299/ The problem is also one of credibility, Bitcoin was supposed to be private and breaching privacy has proved to be pretty trivial. Encryption is hard, but maintaining anonymity is much harder.

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