“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”
Transactions are public. But wallet ownership is not.
That’s why it’s widely used in cybercrime. You can make a wallet and authorities may know which wallet receibe the money, but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.
Yeah, but retrieving actual useful currency from that wallet becomes nearly impossible. At that point, the only way, really, is peer-to-peer transaction. And even then, it seems fraught.
Yeah, but retrieving actual useful currency from that wallet becomes nearly impossible.
Then how do people set up drug empires built around it?
Use your brains.
The same way they do everywhere else… Complex webs of money laundering, but that’s not cheap, or easy.
Or nearly impossible, as evidenced by the litany of small-time vendors who have been operating for years.
On a side note, where are you getting this information from?
You said drug empires, not guy selling 8 balls and 10 packs on a darknet market.
I’m not going to provide sourcing for my throw away comment. Take it, or leave it, doesn’t really matter to me.
You said drug empires, not guy selling 8 balls and 10 packs on a darknet market.
Yeah, because those are the ones LE focuses on. So we can agree that players both big and small are able to cash out on cryptocurrency and your initial point is wrong.
I’m not going to provide sourcing
Lol, okay. You can just admit you don’t have one.
You got me, I’m just making this shit up. I have never even heard of any of the publicly available blockchain forensics databases, or reviewed any of the ample examples of reporting and analysis on the subject.
If this was some obtuse or obscure subject, I’d take the time to cite sources, but it’s not, it’s extremely well covered, so stop being a lazy twat and look for yourself.
Anyone in the crypto space has known this for years.
Thats why privacy coins like Monero exist
You’re not wrong, but the first words are literally “Just over a decade ago”. It’s not a news article, it’s the story of the research in 2013 which revealed bitcoin isn’t anonymous.
It wasn’t a revelation in 2013 either. The ledger data has always been public information.
But neither the addresses nor the people who had them where. It would be like saying that you can identify someone from an arp table because you can see the mac addresses.
Unless you know specifically who own said address (even to the point that those can be spoofed) you just have a big pile of wet paper.
