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.”

    • bjorney@lemmy.caEnglish
      28·
      10 months ago

      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

          • stown@sedd.itEnglish
            6·
            10 months ago

            Well people like you aren’t the issue so much as you are the enablers.

        • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          10 months ago

          I mean, pretty much yeah. I think it’s super clever and elegant, but I’m not going to lie to myself about what the main purpose for something like that would be.

          • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13·
            10 months ago

            The main purpose is to give privacy to digital transactions. Money laundering exists at a much larger scale within institutional banks like Deutsche and Credit Suisse (RIP)

          • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            7·
            10 months ago

            Because protecting privacy is always a bad thing people wearing hoodies do while. Selling babies on the black market? God every corporation and your government wants you to think that so hard. Write your senator a letter about the dangers of this technology, they’ll probably email you a picture of the boner you gave them.

          • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            Meh, anymore I’m not making a distinction between supposed criminals and country level government (and really, state level either).

            Government is the single greatest source of crime IMO, because it offers deniability and the shield of legal violence against people.

            And I’m not just talking about things like Ruby Ridge- those are small scale, individuals. Iran-Contra, Fast and Furious, etc, etc.

            Look into the beginnings of OPEC and that cocksucker Nader.

            So yea, wanting to get the grubby gubmint fingers and eyes out of my shit makes sense.

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
        12·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      Monero is fucking genius actually, I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it, it’s actually incredible.

      Basically, they’ve created a way to make the entire thing opaque. Even the people sending the coin are unable to identify the person they’re sending to.

      I don’t hold any Monero, because I don’t see it as a good investment (no way governemnts allow something that powerfully opaque to thrive), but I respect the technology.

      • tourist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        10 months ago

        I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it

        Could most people understand it if they took the time or did the white paper require several niche latex packages to compile