How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
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."
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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.
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.
Unless I'm mistaken, you still can't unless you are using an on/off-ramp with AML/KYC. You can track it back to a wallet, but until the person interacts with an entity that requires identification in order to buy/sell the crypto for actual useful currency, they're unidentifiable. I guess you'd prob want to use a VPN as well.
At this point, the only real way to avoid that would be peer-to-peer transactions. Basically meeting someone in person and trading your crypto for physical cash.
Bitcoin was designed with the theory that the ledger would be public, but that various techniques would make it very hard to get anything useful out of that ledger other than the fact that a payment went through. These included change addresses so a single payment resulted in 2 transactions to 2 random-seeming addresses. This is described as a "key privacy feature of bitcoin". But, if you can identify which addresses are change addresses and which aren't, that privacy is compromised. That's one of the techniques she developed.
Bitcoin transactions having multiple inputs and multiple outputs was also supposed to be a privacy feature, but it had the drawback of making it easier to cluster addresses as being related.
Basically, the bitcoin devs / early bitcoin enthusiasts thought that despite having a public ledger, they could use security by obscurity as a privacy measure, but Sarah Meiklejohn figured out ways of unraveling that process so it was much easier to trace transactions and the owners of wallets.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
I think that such stuff can be a great layer of privacy and can be set up in a diaspora, in a church, in a community, by a rich guy alone.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Hawala or hewala (Arabic: حِوالة ḥawāla, meaning transfer or sometimes trust), originating in India as havala (Hindi: हवाला), also known as havaleh in Persian, and xawala or xawilaad in Somali, is a popular and informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers (known as hawaladars). They operate outside of, or parallel to, traditional banking, financial channels and remittance systems. The system requires a minimum of two hawaladars that take care of the "transaction" without the movement of cash or telegraphic transfer. While hawaladars are spread throughout the world, they are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Hawala follows Islamic traditions but its use is not limited to Muslims.
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.
Well people like you aren't the issue so much as you are the enablers.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
your fake internet points are routed via north korean money laundering scheme
And yet, crypto bros love pushing the false narrative that bitcoin is an untraceable currency of the future.
In reality, anyone that's looked into crypto in all its popular forms knows it's just a ponzi scheme.
It's so braindead. The entire point of Bitcoin is that it's 100% traceable