“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.”
Which part of public ledger they don’t understand?
Clearly the public part.
The anonymity part
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.
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.
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.
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
The article seemed to focus on the person more than the actual issues with blockchain.
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.
Spoiler: the last one does not exists
Maybe technically… But we’ve come up with some pretty ridiculous cryptography schemes that would take billions of years to crack.
You would be surprised in finding out that the majority of blockchains out there aren’t Quantum resistant, tho (elliptic curves being the reason mainly but I am not an expert)
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.
I don’t think this story is correct, just to chime in with everybody else. It was explicitly stated that bitcoin was a public ledger in the whitepaper.
What part do you not consider correct?
That someone busted the myth of Bitcoin four years after it was made public knowledge that bitcoin was not anonymous.
There was no myth to bust. Bitcoin was explicitly public from its inception.
I guess you hadn’t read the article. The point wasn’t that the ledger is public, but that the accounts allegedly were deemed anonymous.
My point is read the article then criticize it.
I read it, the point is that people who hadn’t even read the basic information about Bitcoin presented by its creator assumed Bitcoin was anonymous.
This is not as groundbreaking as you seem to think it is.
Some people didn’t take the time to read closely or think critically and then made poor assumptions.
Like you, for instance, with your comment.
It’s paywalled.
There’s a difference between “bitcoin is a public ledger” and “we can determine that Alice paid Bob 1 bitcoin”.
The bitcoin devs thought they could achieve the “public ledger” part while avoiding the second part. It turns out they couldn’t.
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.
I knew this in 2007 when I heard about shitcoin. A ledger is a collection of transactions which is widely share, yep sure confedental…
Seriously how stupid can ya be?
That’s crazy that you heard about crypto before it was created in 2008. Are you Satoshi? Did Hal Finney get Internet installed in his casket?
That’s confedental.
So they were off by one year. This was years ago. Hell, I thought I remember reading about it in 2000,apparently not. I’m probably mentally conflating it with the white papers I was reading in the late 90’s, some of my more technical coworkers at that company (which I left in 2000) were hot on what we now call crypto currency.
