Re: The National: Colonial Pipeline’s ransom recovery sparks debate on Bitcoin traceability

[David Barrett]

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 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The National: Colonial Pipeline’s ransom recovery sparks debate on Bitcoin traceability.https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/technology/colonial-pipeline-s-ransom-recovery-sparks-debate-on-bitcoin-traceability-1.1238908
>
>
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