Anyone in the crypto space has known this for years.
Thats why privacy coins like Monero exist
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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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.
Plenty of ways to identify people from their spending habits.
There are also plenty of ways to connect the address to the person. You can subpoena a legit vendor they've paid with that address, for example.
An article in Wired doesn't speak to the "crypto space", they speak to your aunt and uncle in Missouri who don't know about this.
This is the Technology sub on Lemmy, I cant imagine you believe im talking to people in Missouri
St. Louis has a decent tech scene, AT&T used to have their headquarters there. There's still a large tech presence there, low cost of living drives tech companies to hire there since they can pay lower wages and no one in the area really cares since you can still get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month.
I was being tongue in cheek, I dont disparage any particular state.... except Arkansas
I mean I'm an absolute troglodyte when it comes to technology and I'm here too. Hi!
Or pay cash... ultimate "privacy coin"
true, but paying in cash is sort of difficult over the internet.
You can send it via mail, but mail is slow and it could potentially be traced back to you.
How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?
Every time there is a transaction the sender's funds are mixed together with a bunch of other senders, and the recipients receive their money from this random pool, so there is no direct association between sender/receiver
Automated money laundering.
Yes I laundered some of my salary from work. don't report me please.
This is not quite correct. You do not have to involve anybody else in your transaction. What happens is the protocol takes a random selection of 15 other people who have spent money and adds them to a ring so that your transaction could be any one of 16 different outputs. But there is no mixing of funds involved.
your fake internet points are routed via north korean money laundering scheme
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are places you can exchange crypto that exist outside of KYC requirements.
This has to be the most convoluted way of saying someone clustered wallet addresses of a public blockchain. I'm sure there's much more to her work, but this beats so much around the bush.... I'm not going to speculate on the author's motivations for this article, I'll just say I wouldn't waste (more) time on it.
The article’s point appears to be an ad for the book written by the same dude whose byline is on the article.
that makes more sense, considering I felt like reading a darn book that never gets to the point
Which part of public ledger they don't understand?
The how part.
Clearly the public part.
I remember when Bitcoin first came out and one of the selling points of bitcoin was that literally anyone could trace the transfers using the wallet codes and what not no? I don't ever remember there being claims that it was untraceable at least as the selling point to the average consumer. There was even tools in like 2012 for tracking whether stuff internally in bitcoin was stolen or whatever...
"While the taint analysis tool aims at measuring the “correlation” between two addresses, there is another notion of taint in the Bitcoin community which refers to the percentage of bitcoins, that come from a known theft or scam and have been blacklisted by popular exchange markets. For example, in 2012 the bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox froze accounts of customers, who owned bitcoins that could be directly related to such an incident [20]." https://maltemoeser.de/paper/money-laundering.pdf
I think people confuse anonymity (similar to the made up names we use here, or character names in online games, and your wallet ID in a crypto coin) to privacy. Technically, if you receive all your funds in crypto, and you spend all the crypto directly (on goods and services that do not require you to give any PII) without it ever turning to fiat. Then yes, it is anonymous but not private. People can see that wallet hash x received funds from wallet hash y and send some of that to wallet hash z and will be able to confirm that for as long as a copy of the ledger exists somewhere.
Really not sure a codebreaker needed to work this out. Anyone that spent a bit of time understanding how it worked would realise this right away. I have no doubt though, that many people had a total pikachu face when their barely concealed illegal activities were easily discovered.
There should be more education on the difference between "privacy being available if you look for it" VS "privacy being ensured since the beginning and forever no matter what"
Spoiler: the last one does not exists
Monero comes the closest, but there is a possibility that ring signatures could be broken in the future for sure.
Ethereum supports anonymized tokens and rollups too, if you choose to use them.
That's the difference though. On Ethereum you have to choose to use them. On Monero it's private by default. And that's the way it ought to be.
If you're using the anonymized tokens then your transactions are private by default.
Anonymization requires a bunch of computational overhead which means that anonymized transactions cost more to execute, all else being equal. So a blockchain where you can choose whether you're using anonymization or not depending on your particular needs is better than one where it's forced on every transaction.
Bear in mind, Ethereum is a platform. It has many different tokens with different properties running on that platform, some of which are as anonymous as Monero. Use the ones with the properties you need.
Oh, I see what you mean now. I have heard of privacy projects that are anonymous sometimes and not anonymous at other times like Zcash and was under the impression that is kind of what you meant.
Those sorts of things exist on Ethereum too. There are also "mixers", like Tornado Cash, that can anonymize a particular transaction using a normally non-anonymized token. The Ethereum philosophy is to provide a broad range of tools that can interoperate with each other, allowing people to use whichever ones suit their specific need.
The main way criminals are caught is when they transfer their crypto to an exchange so they can convert it to cash. Law enforcement will subpoena the exange and ask “Hey, who exchanged 0.7886 bitcoin for cash on this date?” and they will get their identity. Using the public ledger, they will be able to trace the transactions done and show that this person sent money to an address advertised as belonging to a trafficking site, an illegal market, or recieved money from the bad wallet address.
The address owner is anonymous until there is a source of data that ties information the wallet, and often transactions can be used to do that, just as any way to advertise a wallet belongs to you can, or any way to exchange crypto to cash can.