311–320 of 480 posts
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Do you not tie yourself to your Bitcoin when you try to use it for something physical like turning it into cash or buying a physical asset? Can you not track all Bitcoins going in and out of a mixer?
When you use a mixer, there’s a delay between when you put your money in and when it comes back out. The mixing service randomly splits up the transaction into batches and sends them out at different times. So even if you know that somebody sent to a mixer (perhaps as an investigator you could find out mixer addresses by sending lots of transactions to the mixer service yourself), you wouldn’t be able to associate th…
Why would the mixer need to reuse addresses when you could create a brand new one each time.
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The main one I know of is international money transfers (remittances). Usually these have to go through an oligopoly that sets the fees and exchange rates to be favorable to itself. This is the kind of market that's pretty big on the international scale, but it's completely boring and non-sensational to read about a bunch of people who are sending $400 to their moms on a regular basis.
As far as I know, nearly everyone uses Western Union (Transferwise etc. etc.) for that. Bitcoin is too costly* and complicated for most people. * Two set of fees to exchange crypto to fiat + transfer fee compared to one set of fiat currency exchange + transfer fee.
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1. Passing keys around risks the original sender (or anyone listening in) grabbing the money after 'payment', and voids any guarantees Bitcoin etc. might be able to make - the transaction isn't even listed on the chain. This would turn a 'trustless blockchain' to a 'non-blockchain relying on trust'. Assuming this transition can even be done (what would be the point of cryptocurrency in that case?), the result would b…
That implementation of offline transactions is a poor one, so the rebuttal would be too, but the reality is that bitcoin can work with offline transactions. You can create the transaction object and hand that over. Transferrable literally as a file. Instead of having over notes with the private key on them. Eventually that transaction will need to be settled onchain. This can work in a world without a familiar lookin…
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I'm just looking at how it is currently used. If after all these years there isn't a positive use-case to offset it, there might not be one at all.
That's because you live in a country with a functioning currency.
Whilst paying the ransom is often advisable in specific cases like these, it’s absolutely a bad thing for society as a whole. Seeing successes like this will encourage organised crime to keep doing this, as they know there’s gonna be a big reward. It’s like the prisoners dilemma. If people didn’t pay the ransom, there wouldn’t be ransomware. But people don’t take precautions, so they have to pay the ransom, leading t…
To be honest, just how bad of a thing is this? It’s a direct financial punishment for a company with lax security practices. It encourages greater security practices. The money is funnelled to a criminal group, but what difference does it make? Some people consider the USG to be a criminal group; many people are out on the streets for that. My tax dollars directly go to corrupt crooks and nonexistent companies claimi…
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Can you really not follow the trail from the mixers?
CipherTrace says they lost the trail on the twitter hackers when they threw the btc they scammed into mixers. On the other hand, the Feds arrested a kid in Florida, so my question is... how did they find him?
Then bragged about it and went for more accounts. His friends left him when he went for the high profile accounts. I think it was organized on discord.
Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
>Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. >This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era.... Instead democratizing currency, we're democratizing large scale crime. Just wanted to make this same point - right now, cryptocurrency has negative value for society. Perhaps this is a justification for banning the current impleme…
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Do you not tie yourself to your Bitcoin when you try to use it for something physical like turning it into cash or buying a physical asset? Can you not track all Bitcoins going in and out of a mixer?
500 unrelated accounts all deposit money into a single shared account. From that shared account, payments are made to 1,000 other accounts. None of the amounts match the original deposits, even when summed. Whose money is whose? This is an oversimplification, but it should give you a rough idea of how difficult it is to trace Bitcoin.
You'd be surprised. The feds have very advanced taint analysis if they have reason to go after you.