I am very confused why anyone thinks Bitcoin is untraceable, anonymous, or anything less than a privacy disaster. It is literally the least private currency ever devised: once I know your wallet, I know truly everything you have ever done back to the very start. Bitcoin is as private as sharing all your credit card purchases via twitter: yes, very noisy, but totally in the open (and "mixing" things between wallets is just silly -- computers can unwind all that in a millisecond). If you have a mapping of "human identity to wallet" (which the government nearly always has because virtually every path to convert BTC to USD/EUR/etc is regulated), then no matter how many intermediate steps and secret wallets are used as some kind of "factoring" approach toward money laundering, you can always figure out who is being paid by whom. In fact, it's *easier* for the FBI to unwind your laundering via BTC than normal banks, because normal banks *have shitloads of privacy protections and subpoena requirements that BTC doesn't*. The only way it's private is if you skip every exchange, but that's the classic tradeoff of privacy for convenience -- yes, there are lots of ways to maintain your privacy inconveniently, and BTC is just one more. And if the only way to truly do anonymous transfers is by meeting up in person to exchange cash for a keydrive containing a wallet private key, then BTC is really no better on the privacy/convenience spectrum than just handing someone a suitcase of gold. Blockchain is great and all, but in none of the ways people investing in it claim. -david On Sat, Jun 12, 2021 at 7:13 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
The National: Colonial Pipeline’s ransom recovery sparks debate on Bitcoin traceability.https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/colonial-pipeline-s-rans...