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The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

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Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#131

Post by mkhpalm »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #37
SahAssar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But used as intended (not via a KYC exchange) it is pseudonymous, right?

How is that helpful? Get Bitcoin from crime Wash into monero? Pray the tumbler is legit? Wash back into Bitcoin Now what? Bitcoins from tumblers are suspect everywhere with kyc requirements. Sell off books to a Russian oligarch or North Korea I guess?

Mint some pixel art into NFTs and then purchase them with your anonymous filthy lucre wallet(s).

Cash out after selling your subjective value art.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#132

Post by acdha »

mjevans wrote: post #95
acdha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you and everyone you ever deal with have perfect security. As soon as one person’s identity is leaked, that opens the possibility of a real-world ID being linked to a wallet. This story from about a year ago also showed how that worked with investigators tracing it link by link: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

"Leaked" also includes cashing in or out of Bitcoin.

Or using a business which is required to report transactions, using a site which gets hacked, etc. I don’t think people sufficiently weight the risk of having a ledger which can’t be redacted – for example, I’d imagine there were a lot of people in Weimar Germany who did not think twice about donating to a synagogue or other organization which you would not want have wanted linked to your bank account a decade later.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#133

Post by gibb0n »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #37
SahAssar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But used as intended (not via a KYC exchange) it is pseudonymous, right?

How is that helpful? Get Bitcoin from crime Wash into monero? Pray the tumbler is legit? Wash back into Bitcoin Now what? Bitcoins from tumblers are suspect everywhere with kyc requirements. Sell off books to a Russian oligarch or North Korea I guess?

on the recent darknet diaries episode the guy bought weed/drugs and sold them wholesale to get it back in to cash

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#134

Post by acdha »

ETH_start wrote: post #110
inlined wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the constitution prohibits banning software?

The First Amendment.

That covers you publishing software. It doesn’t cover providing a service to criminals and personally profiting from it, and the constitution definitely gives the government authority to police that so it’s going to come down to how well they can prove that those guys were going more than just releasing code.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#135

Post by acdha »

nobody9999 wrote: post #126
acdha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but this is the kind of thing which is very easy to get wrong in ways which are significant legal risks on their own. For example, if you were some random cryptobro buying personal quantities of drugs in 2015 there’s some risk but the FBI probably isn’t going to spend time on something that small. If you do anything which reveals funds going to or from a tumbler, however, the risk isn’t just KYC but also que…

>Lying to them is a federal crime, too, so even if you nothing other than tumble coins for ideological reasons you’d want to be very careful about what you say – and think about how hard it could be to prove you didn’t know the other parties in a transaction. This is true. However, I'd present a few caveats: 1. Even though it's a felony to lie to Federal (and some state/local) law enforcement in the US, you can just…

> So, unless you're prepared to cover your tracks (in this case, it was bitcoin transactions) over and over forever, you run the risk of being caught -- eventually.

This is really the main thing I was thinking about: it’s been bizarre how the salespeople kept going on about bitcoin being anonymous when it’s more like “if you do everything perfectly, you probably won’t be tracked. As far as we know now.”, which is just incredibly fragile.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#136

Post by dist1ll »

senectus1 wrote: post #70
phyzome wrote: post #19

Say it with me: "Bitcoin is not, and never was, anonymous."

I know right?!? The WHOLE PREMISE of it was that it is an OPEN LEDGER...! I'm not sure how this persistent myth of it being a way to secretly make payments got around and stuck so well... maybe the "crypto" in the name?

"Open" is a heavily overloaded term. One of the main premises of Bitcoin is tamperproofness and permissionless participation.

That in itself does not equate to lack of anonymity. Just have a look at Zcash[0] or Monero[1].

In general, the idea that openness and anonymity are in conflict with each other has not been true for at least 40 years. There's entire field of mathematics dedicated to solving this problem known as secure multi-party computation.

[0] https://z.cash/technology/

[1] https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#137

Post by noduerme »

kjellsbells wrote: post #123
noduerme wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you trade in and out for cash, in person with a counterparty, from a self-hosted wallet that you never use to send or receive from any other wallet that's connected to an exchange... then yes. The use case for this is mainly moving money over borders.

This makes bitcoin sounds like a complicated technical reimplementation of hawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala?wprov=sfla1

It actually is exactly like Hawala, and I've traded BTC in and out with networks that had roughly the same human topography. That was the original killer app or crypto.

FWIW, we Jews (speaking for my family) mostly think the Rothschilds were pretty smart for working out the same type of system by placing a brother in each European capital and banking to kings, keeping a ledger instead of moving physical gold whenever possible. It seems obvious now, but it was "moving fast and breaking things" in the 18th Century.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#138

Post by acdha »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #104
paulpauper wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by simply using a third wallet that does not link the two? HIs mistake was a rookie move that could have been avoided but he got lazy. Lazy criminals make law enforcement's job easier. https://twitter.com/Rarest2012/status/1646211056782524442

I don’t understand what the third wallet does. If the first wallet is tainted, anybody can just look to see what destination wallets it sends to and follow the trail. Adding an extra wallet doesn’t help.

This is just part of the Bitcoin sales process: any time a case gets attention showing that a common marketing claim is wrong, the sales guys come up with a reason to say it was the victim’s fault rather than a weakness of the system they’re trying to get you to buy into.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#139

Post by nwah1 »

ricochet11 wrote: post #121
nwah1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what basis do you make this statement?

fun thread: https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1641927617216655360?s=20 (corruption part starts at https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1641927647440830465?s=20 )

This was a thorough explanation. Thank you.

It does sound like the history of corruption from 2013 means they have to stay alert to this problem.

And it also sounds like the revolving door of government has allowed a lot of the former investigators to get high paying gigs at crypto scam outfits. Not a good look.

Overall, it seems like the government dealt with the corruption adequately, however. It is not reasonable to assume that any institution will be free of bad actors. The question is whether those actors are punished or not.

I have become tired of the overly cynical and hostile rhetoric directed at law enforcement, especially just lazy stuff. But this thread was thorough and fact-based.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#140

Post by hanniabu »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #104
paulpauper wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by simply using a third wallet that does not link the two? HIs mistake was a rookie move that could have been avoided but he got lazy. Lazy criminals make law enforcement's job easier. https://twitter.com/Rarest2012/status/1646211056782524442

I don’t understand what the third wallet does. If the first wallet is tainted, anybody can just look to see what destination wallets it sends to and follow the trail. Adding an extra wallet doesn’t help.

That's the point
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