Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.

“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.”

  • daniskarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
    66·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      41·
      10 months ago

      but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.

      Impossible using the blockchain itself, but not as impossible when you add more traditional investigative techniques to the mix.

      • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
        12·
        10 months ago

        Provided that the exchanges are cooperating (voluntarily or by law).

        Why do you think NK and other “impenetrable” countries are so fond of it? It provides them with the means to monetize something otherwise pretty useless: their relative independence and the resulting potential for secrecy.

        They are turning into new-age Swiss banks, keeping anyone’s private ledgers private. For a hefty sum.

        And one does not need a strong currency to achieve that: other cryptocurrencies are also perfectly usable.

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          People don’t need an exchange either. Someone can create a physical paper wallet with no copy of its keys and who ever holds it owns it.

          Organized crime has existed for a while, the boss rarely gets their hands dirty and the grunt isn’t involved and in the know enough about the bigger crime to be charged too harshly if their part in it was discovered.

          • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            The point of the exchange in that context is to have a separate ledger. That is, to hide parts of the information, so that it is then impossible to relate information otherwise public.

            You cannot do that with a paper wallet. A wallet (cryptographic material) and a ledger (a collection of transfers - the blockchain being an example of one) are totally unrelated.

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      37·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      10 months ago

      And it becomes much, much easier to track down and remove anonymity the moment real currency transactions are made. Because of KYC requirements, the only way to stay anonymous with crypto is to keep your crypto transactions entirely outside of the real world. Once your digital anonymous currency interacts with real money you’ve not anchored your wallet to your identity.