US Law Enforcement Traces Bitcoin Transfers to Nab ‘Largest’ Child Porn Site
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
‘One of the weirdest things in recent financial/criminal history is that for a while people really believed that Bitcoin, an electronic payments method that creates a permanent, traceable, public record of all transactions and links them to identifiable accounts, was somehow a good way to pay for crime. “It’s completely anonymous,” people thought, “like digital cash, but you can send it anywhere and no one will be able to trace you.” Not really! I suppose it was even true for a little while, but eventually law enforcement agencies figured out how to trace Bitcoin transactions, and then the fact that years’ worth of criminal financial transactions were just forever openly available to them on the Bitcoin blockchain was … bad for criminals.‘
I don't think it's likely true but it's an entertaining gedanken experiment.
I have never heard a convincing argument for your quote and would like everyone to at least consider malice when the situation warrants it. Maybe "follow the money" would be an equally valid, but contradictory heuristic to deal with unclear situations.
I don't really get it, but you have a "money out" problem like any fraud.
Even if you buy bitcoin in untraceable in cash, you transfer it to wallets, you have two eventual issues. You'll either buy something and ship it to yourself, or you'll need to get real cash out. The former leaves a vendor ready to give you up, and the latter only works with exchanges that have your ID.
Am I missing something?
Actually, that is kinda scary. The bitcoin I just got for selling a shirt could be one transaction away from child pornography. And it is all in a pubic database.
You will?
Also, you have an infinite number of trivially easy to make BTC wallets that are not registered to anyone. That's how you can make it anonymous.
That's not a problem. The problem is that if you are not trading with yourself whoever gets your bitcoins has a connection between a physical "you" and and a wallet that "you" used to transfer money. Now the opsec of the transaction depends not only on "you" but also on opsec of that other person. Eventually someone in that path decides it to cooperate with whoever leans on them in the real, not bitcoin world and the security of that stage is blown. Repeat until "you" is discovered.
Evil Criminal Mastermind amasses wealth in BTC. --> They have that BTC in a wallet. --> The Feds know that Dirty Money has gone to that wallet's address. --> ECM makes a new wallet, transfers BTC to it. --> Feds know that BTC went from wallet A to wallet B.
However many wallets Evil Criminal Mastermind makes, they're still going to be traceable by the Feds, right?
Yes, if:
>>ECM makes a new wallet, transfers BTC to it.
But if ECM initiates a new wallet with cash or other methods and doesn't tie their identity to it, then no.
They don’t. A wallet can have infinitely many addresses with nothing linking them together externally - only the holder of the wallet knows they’re related.
Think of a Bitcoin wallet as macOS’ Keychain or a LastPass account - and a Bitcoin address as the login credentials of each site you visit: provided you use a distinct login for each site, each site owner has no idea what other sites are in your LastPass/Keychain store.
Similarly: provided you use a new address for each bitcoin transaction then people you transact with have no knowledge of other transactions you’ve had.
People do often reuse addresses - however. Creating new addresses is free and instant - but consolidating your funds becomes a pain, especially if you have a lot of low-value transactions where the amount associated with each address would be eaten-up by the bitcoin network’s transaction fees.
And dumb criminals reuse addresses too - sometimes you see those “I have your password, send me bitcoin” emails using leaked passwords - and they all use the same (or a small number of addresses) - if this scam was run better they’d generate a new ransom address for each mail recipient. And I think that’s how they busted the operator and customers of the website in question: because they used a single address to receive funds at.
It may not be traceable directly through the blockchain(s), but the exchange destination will be, and they're almost certainly going to be complying with local laws which means they'll respond to a subpoena for data and give law enforcement whatever info they have on you, and most exchanges require KYC verification to handle any significant amount of funds.
The problem is that most people don't do either of those things, instead, they buy and sell it at exchanges with very traceable credit cards.
Now, the rules of operation of the mixer may (and in practice, definitely do) invalidate that link in reality, but it still exists in the protocol and can be the subject of legislation.
[1] For example, if the mixer wallet is created with nothing and receives 100 BTC from 8 other wallets, there's no record that looks like "Mixer Wallet: 100 BTC". Instead, there's a set of records that looks like this:
Mixer received 52 BTC from tx 5d41 [which deposited 2,000 BTC in Kingpin]
Mixer received 20 BTC from tx 402a [which deposited 20 BTC in Whore]
Mixer received 10 BTC from tx bc4b [which deposited 100 BTC in Hitman]
Mixer received 13 BTC from tx 2a76 [which deposited 2,000 BTC in Kingpin]
Mixer received 5 BTC from tx b971 [which deposited 8 BTC in Smuggler]
Which IMO just makes everyone liable, the law usually doesn't look favourably upon intentionally tricky bullshit.
A transaction has only one source, so that payout is obviously attributable to the source transaction. If the mixer gave you 5 BTC from Whore, you're holding Whore bitcoins. If the mixer gave you 5 BTC from Kingpin, you're holding Kingpin bitcoins.
In your example, the original owner of the whore coins would end up with the kingpin coins and vice versa.
It is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
But the protocol doesn't reflect the reality of the mixer; the mixer is built on top of the protocol. Within the protocol, those coins are still linked, allowing perfect tracking of coins as they pass through the mixer.
You can argue in court that your kingpin coins aren't really kingpin coins, but you'll always be hamstrung by the evidence. What you really have are plainly-labeled kingpin coins and an admission to purposefully receiving contraband.
At the end of the day that new wallet needs to be converted to cash or use to pay for something to be useful, which makes it traceable, which ties the person to using a mixer which I have no doubts will become illegal itself if it becomes a problem.
You can earn bitcoin anonymously by mining it - at least this was more feasible a couple of years ago than it is now - but in 2011-2017 if you were to buy $4,000 worth of graphics cards you could mine $4,000 worth of cryptocurrency on Nicehash in a few months (and keep going to make a profit too). No ID required (though they probably track your IP address somewhere...)
...after spending a few thousand on GPUs first, right before the crash. Ouch.
Unless the localbitcoin guy is an FBI agent or something...
But if you're accepting payment and then cashing out, you will need a safe way to cash out and localbitcoins will get you caught fast. Agents would see the money going to a localbitcoins user. They could either setup a sting or just contact whomever has been buying these coins off of you.
By design, bitcoin uses a public ledger. This sort of investigation being possible shouldn't catch anybody by surprise.
"Some men just want to see the world burn."
I wish I was better.
What it boils down to is that, on average, white collar criminals can expect to go home to $1 million per year of time actually served behind bars.
It made me wonder what the expected outcome of the class was.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21275859
But even if that wasn't true, you could still compare expected value. For instance, if you had an 80% chance of successfully embezzling $8 million without getting caught, and a 20% chance of serving 2 years of jail, this would translate to an expected value of $1 million per year served.
The expected number of years served is gonna be something like, say, 80% chance of 0 years, or 20% chance of 10 years, averaging out to 2 years (I'm making these figures up). So if you get $2M from that, then you're averaging two years.
This means some people exit jail penniless and some exit jail with hundreds of millions.
Perhaps the authors of the paper should have presented the median rather than the average; however as a typical college student I was more focused on delivering the assignment than criticizing the researchers.
There are also likely a lot of people who get out before they are caught, after making a modest amount of money.
All Law Enforcement has ever needed to do is trace back the transactions - something that's almost impossible with conventional currencies. Heck the equitable principle of 'Tracing' exists in Law because it's normally impossible to do that once monies have intermingled.
The sheer practicality of it is demonstrated in the fact that it's only worthwhile or practicable for Law Enforcement to investigate _large-scale_ money-laundering operations. Yet with Bitcoin you can essentially read back the exact history of every single satoshi.
The only way to make yourself untracable is to leave no trace
You mine the coin yourself. That minimizes the info you have to provide.
It's one of the reasons why China became such a hotspot of Bitcoin mining.
I'm pointing out that even if it's traced, getting to pick who traces you can add a layer of practical anonymity.
Then it's more about convenience than anything else. Bitcoin usability is abysmal when compared to Paypal or Visa but it's pretty great when neither of these things are an option and usually drug dealers won't manage to get a Visa or Paypal vendor account working for very long.
yet. If this becomes a problem, it will be fully automated. Why wouldn't it be? You're literally leaving a trail of every unlawful payment you've ever made and waving it around in front of police. You don't think they'll pay someone to automate de-anonymiziation and automatic suspicious transaction flagging?
At least with Visa they need a warrant.
It could be a loan/gift or whatever made to the individual by someone who is not knowledgeable about their criminal behaviour like a cousin or uncle.
I don't live in the US but it seems from what the police say on the tv series cops that all are to be treated as innocents until proven otherwise..
But then again, me and my friends here in Norway has always reworded that to "All blacks are considered guilty until proven white" so it might not really mean anything in practice.
If you purchase from someone who's only job was selling weed, and deposited your money into his account labeled "weed sales," then they probably have a good case.
I'm not in this business myself but I suspect they don't write these things down in the transaction but I've been wrong before :p
Let's leave the conspiracy theories to the pro-Bitcoin folks, it's kind of their speciality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115607
Has the site policy towards this topic shifted since that recent highly-popular post with long-time HN contributors commenting in it?
Personally, I don't understand how one time use money cards would have any preventions to prevent the same thing from happening. One could send someone to buy a stack of them with a wad of cash, and the original store the cards are delivered to might be tracked, but after that, what else is there? The money gets transferred out, and they might not even know what the purchase was.
There are more private cryptocurrencies, but it's near mathematically provable that all with sufficient transaction history and brute forcing capability are traceable. In the case of law enforcement, all they have to do is sit in these transactions until the have the CPU power to break them. I'd had to be the one that used cryptocurrency to buy something illegal knowing that 50 copies of the ledger exist on other people's computers.
Practically speaking, though, users of privacy coins are usually looking for plausible deniability rather than total untraceability. The legal standard for criminal cases is "beyond a reasonable doubt"; if there's even a 50% chance that you're just an innocent person caught up by circumstances, you'll have trouble convincing a jury of guilt.
Also, you imply that some amazing computational shortcuts aren't ever going to be arrived at. This historically, is hard to be sure of. Not saying everything will be broken, but more of it is all the time.
That's partially true. Off the top of my head you can convert it to bullion fairly easily [1][2] and there are DNM cash out services on most DNMs too, a lot of trust there but if you spread it out over multiple vendors and smaller transactions you could convert it to physical cash. Each transaction increases your risk of detection by postal police and by just getting ripped off by the seller or the mail carrier though.
[1] for example JM Bullion (and others) accept bitcoin https://www.jmbullion.com/buying-gold-silver-bitcoin-faq/
[2] some sellers on /r/pmsforsale will accept bitcoin occasionally.
I suspect that banning cash would result in an ad hoc barter system for goods and services. If people are engaging in economic activity they want to hide from the government, and find others willing to engage in the same activity, they'll probably work something out, right? Whether it's masks that could potentially hide someone from facial-recognition cameras or something else.
A casual interaction between shopkeeper and customer would never be facilitated by barter in such a hostile environment.
It's the sort of thing you spend a few years normalizing instead of implementing in one fell swoop. Rapid changes unnerve people and a rapid elimination of cash could cause civil or economic unrest. I believe India has experimented with demonetizing larger bills, and in Sweden businesses that accept cash are becoming increasingly uncommon, as are people who use cash.
When the majority no longer consider cash important, eliminating cash becomes safer. More people adopt the mentality that cash users are criminals with something to hide or generally just paranoid weirdos, and are consequently less likely to object when the use of cash is further restricted. Moreover, with fewer people using cash, the government has largely achieved their objective already. When few people use cash the haystack the needles are hidden in becomes much smaller.
Regular people who don't care about privacy or censorship resistance will use credit cards. This is in the interest of the powerful because you can easily disable service for undesirables.
The rest will use Bitcoin
Further, if something's illegal in a different jurisdiction than you are in, you aren't usually exposed to any liability, as any tourist to Amsterdam will tell you. And not having a payment record doesn't change the fact you did it and will undoubtably have left other evidence.
Once again, these are social problems that magic beans won't solve.
You may not be exposed to liability back in the US, but that doesn't mean your Visa/Mastercard will necessarily work if you're doing something illegal in the US: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/square-canada-1.53031...
These are again, very much, social and not technological problems that require cryptocurrency.
In Canada for instance, you can easily get a merchant account with Moneris (a Canadian payment processor) and take card transactions over Interac (the Canadian debit network). Yeah, Square's bound by their US banks, because they're a US company with an overwhelmingly US product being sold internationally.
Ironically the government here in Ontario will sell you marijuana by mail and they accept Visa and Mastercard! The rules must be very vague and inconsistent.
My mental model was like yours, and like friends in college who fantasized about road trips to another state or Canada to find a bar that would serve 19 year olds. Not all laws are about the location of the act. Countries can and occasionally do bar their citizens from doing things anywhere, as was the case of Cuban goods.
There's also some weird extradition stuff that's been floating around lately that I can't make heads or tails of. There's definitely some fearmongering going on around it but I don't know if that means I should be concerned or dismissive.
And then there's one little idea. This may be crazy, but if the citizens of your country generally agreed that something was dirtbag behavior, you going somewhere where there is no law against it still makes you a dirtbag. Just a law-fearing dirtbag.
Ex post facto requires maintenance and vigilance, like any piece of safety equipment. Don't just count on it always being there. We all have to work at it.
So because the root cause is a (probably unsolvable) societal problem, we should just forget about technical workarounds like Bitcoin?
This whole thread reminds me of the early South Park episode where all the Catholic diocese...s? meet to figure out how to stop getting caught molesting children.
You could stop molesting children. That would definitely work.
This is the HN discussion when that article was posted a year ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687008
This is the r/Monero discussion where people much smarter than myself talked about the article's shortcomings:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/87hr28/hn_discussio...
It's hard/impossible to prove a negative.
It seems perhaps that gap is closing now. Like other free markets, crime is an arbitrage system.
Don't most illegal users use tumblers that commingle money from many addresses and then send back (in different quantities and at random times and sometimes from unrelated addresses) bitcoin of roughly the same value? Or is that no longer the case now that transaction costs are higher?
If you can narrow a suspect pool from millions down to hundreds by showing they were at the same 'location' as the perpetrator, that's not great but it's surely a start.
What percentage of people using tumblers aren't up to something sketchy? Even if that's 95% that's still greatly amplifying the signal when you're talking about looking for one individual among a hundred thousand.
Edit: upon reading up on the bitcoin ATM's it looks like some of them have started requiring phone verification where they will text you a sms, in that case you could need to use a burner phone creating one more step in the process of remaining completely anonymous. But certainly a doable step.
And showing up at an ATM with a mask will definitely attract some attention. I wouldn't be surprised if they further improve their system and requires facial detection (not necessarily recognition) as well.
You don't get any other identifiers. You might get an IP address that broadcasted the transaction, but that's not in the blockchain.
And it's trivial to create a new address. Or a thousand of them.
So besides a few known addresses, you're not going to easily find the owner of address X. Some exchanges might sell you some info, but not openly.
In defense of it, there are various sites where you can find a local seller online and go give them cold hard cash and have it sent to a one time wallet. Then go home and then, or at some date in the future, deposit it into a DNM wallet and order whatever you want.
From that point you basically have to have a DNM compromised, them to track every single external deposit, track down BilboBaggins17 that you traded cash for, then attempt to get the records for the site you contacted him via as well as try to get him to remember where he met you and when to go attempt to get surveillance then hope either the logs of the site or the surveillance video lead them to you so they can hope to find some way to catch you buying another ounce of shrooms in the future.
But yes, it's stupid for things like the above where creeps probably went to an exchange, bought bitcoin with their bank account then transferred it to their wallet then the ring (or directly to the ring).
---
Now as a seller, yeah bitcoin is generally just dumb. Sure there are DNM vendors that will convert it to cold hard cash for you (I suspect in the U.S. this is probably being done by some dispensaries, or companies serving dispensaries, to get some of their cash digital) but there is a lot of trust there. Aside from those services, there's no really semi-anonymous way to convert your bitcoin that you obtain from illicit trade into fiat unless you want to get really complicated and shift it from bitcoin to some other crypto, then probably go another step and shift it from that crypto to a third crypto, then from there convert the crypto to fiat. Each stage you are losing transaction fees and probably paying some sort of premium which is going to really start digging into your profit and then you still have to clean the fiat to make it legitimate if you're talking about money you plan to live off of. If you were a small-time seller of something you might fly under the radar by claiming it's various mined and day-traded crypto you've been holding for years but you're probably going to want to pay short term capital gains on it when ou convert fiat and get hammered hard on the taxes which to me would make breaking multiple laws just not worth it.
---
What I really want to know is how are the larger ransomware operators converting it to fiat unless they are just using it to buy drugs and/or carded merchandise then sell that for fiat.
> What I really want to know is how are the larger ransomware operators converting it to fiat
Nothing is off limits for them. They can buy credit cards and bank account credentials, exchange coins to it and withdraw cash through ATMs, or buy something with that money and sell it cheaper for cash.
If you want to go to the BTM route, they convert to monero, and use the "monerujo wallet" to auto-convert to bitcoin at the BTM. The only downfall is the btm asks for ID after $2000 or so. So I assume it's taxed in some way. The margins on drugs is high enough where the extra fee they have to pay is negligable
The real concern IMHO is the seller's opsec. When you're sending them pgp-encrypted orders containing your shipping address for receiving contraband. Are they sticking your address in an addressbook? Keeping the messages around long-term? If they get busted, will law enforcement be able to access all their encrypted messages?
If the communications aren't immediately destroyed, it's very likely a busted dealer will cooperate with law enforcement for a reduced sentence, which will almost certainly include granting access to all their encrypted communications.
I suspect nobody wants their name and address added to any of the relevant lists law enforcement could trivially maintain at little cost.
Also, laws change.
This isn't actually a feature of most legal systems, so depends where they're located.
Although it can be traced. No one has the power to block or return a transaction. Once sent, it was gone.
With any other traditional means of payment, money can be withdrawn or blocked with a court order. With Bitcoin, if there is no collaboration from the wallet owner, this is impossible.
Those who use Bitcoin for illegal activities are at various risk of being tracked, not just by ledger. A good investigator and the criminal system need much more evidence.
Now one risk he does not want to make is selling the goods and not receiving the money. It is this reliability that Bitcoin offers that compensates for the risk of being tracked eventually.
https://reason.com/2017/10/13/cases-dropped-oakland-cops-dro...
"Judge Jon Rolefson dismissed charges against former Contra Costa County Sheriff's Deputy Ricardo Perez [...]
Perez was charged with felony unlawful sex with a minor, felony oral copulation with a minor, and two misdemeanor counts of engaging in lewd conduct. But Rolefson decided there was insufficient evidence Perez knew that Guap was under age 18. "
Not very hard, since the chances of a child being abused by a priest are incredibly small. I saw a chart of it from a .gov web site a couple of years ago, and it had public school teachers at 5x the rate of priests.
The reason the Church thing is a big scandal isn't because of the frequency, it's because of the cover-ups, and because priests are supposed to be at the top of the list of people that children can trust.
Also I recall this story, so hoping your statistics are off-
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/20/cathol...
it all just comes down to that the walls of anonymity are coming down and the privacy we are so afraid will be taken away by some corporation was long lost to the government who valued it even less
It takes $X million to collect evidence, hire a prosecutor, take time up in court AND they still have to balance the budget by going after different kinds of criminals so the agency looks like it's doing something to the general public.
So no, it's not a stupid conspiracy. Pay your taxes and vote for representatives that will increase funding!
Imagine a money laundering operation, where every laundered physical dollar gets a physical stamp of 'THIS CAME THROUGH A MONEY LAUNDERING OPERATION'. That's the current state of BitCoin tumblers.
edit: To expand it's harder than tracking normal money laundering too because the "businesses" (ie wallets) can be generated by the thousands per second.
Assuming they can actually identify it as having gone through a tumbler, sure, but it's not like tumblers advertise the addresses they use. Especially not distributed systems like CoinJoin. These are just ordinary transactions that happen to include inputs and outputs from multiple, unrelated sources. Following long-established best practices, any given address will only be used once.
They could ban exchanges from accepting coins that do not come directly from another authorized, compliant exchange, but that would be tantamount to banning cryptocurrencies altogether. It wouldn't stop them of course, just drive them underground.
But it may be moot if the exchanges simply mark any bitcoin that has gone through a tumbler as tainted and refuse to convert it into anything else.
No, they're not in the source code itself, but without them the project would still be sputtering along in almost total obscurity, if not abandoned altogether by now.
I did find a chart where it is the 4th most accepted after BTC, LTC, and ETH.
I imagine those other coins are more accepted because they have larger network effects. I also imagine that Monero's network will grow even more as it becomes more developed.
HSI computer forensic examiners found more than 1,000 images and 125 videos depicting the sexual victimization of children on Pannell’s home-built tower computer. The images and videos depicted pre-pubescent girls, including toddlers, engaged in sexual acts with adults.
Pannell faces five to 20 years in prison, up to a life term of supervised release, and a $250,000.00 fine, as well as registering as a sex offender. U.S. District Judge Greg G. Guidry will sentence him on Dec. 17.
Former HSI agent Richard Nikolai Gratkowski, 40 at the time, was sentenced in May to 70 months in federal prison on child pornography charges. The investigation showed that Gratkowski, in San Antonio, received hundreds of videos of pre-pubescent children engaged in a variety of sexual acts and had also bought access with cryptocurrency.
What is open source intelligence?
Edit: and given that they have rescued dozens of abused children, I assume they optimized for active abusers, but were happy to scoop up anyone else who surfaced in their investigation.
Transfer the value to another anonymized blockchain and make future transactions nearly impossible to track.
At this point in time, consensus is that Monero is safe.
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
You should feel better that on a per-capita basis this is an extremely rare occurrence. Like around the same chances as being struck by lightning. It's horrible, but not widespread.
On the one hand I believe the Internet should be a truly personalized, private interface for humans all over the world to be able to communicate freely and privately - safe from censorship, mass-surveillance, profiling, and so on.
On the other hand I also believe if the Internet was that way, then it would mean that these elements of society, the ones that seek to horrifically and tragically exploit the most vulnerable of us, would be able to do so relatively unimpeded.
Then I realized that nothing about moving humans online made humans magically more virtuous than they are in meatspace, and the tools we've used to audit and intercept bad-behaving humans in the real world have merit online too.
There's a reason so much motion online in the past two decades has been in the direction of "de-wild-Westing" it.
The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are.
So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.
This was back in 2000 and digital cameras were rare, expensive, and not the best quality. So we were how a lot of people got their film onto the Internet. I had a special number for the police on speed dial. A few times a week I would have to call because of kiddie porn. Clearly sexual stuff and not just kids in the bathtub. It always struck me as odd that people used our service since you actually had to pick up the cds. Where the police would be waiting for you.
We also had to process crime scene pictures for some smaller police stations. Lots of suicide pictures. I do not miss that job.
You can thank anti social capitalist system for that. In some countries some people are so desperate to make some money that they are willing to make porn with their own children and sell it to strangers.
She was 6.
1) the necessary sexual dimorphism that makes sexual reproduction possible, actually took an unfortunate shortcut: childlike features are retained in females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny), which ostensibly requires "less" DNA encoding, while males actually "develop" into more "adult" forms (body hair, musculature, height, deeper voice, etc.)
2) the reproductive window of women is far smaller than men, causing men of all ages to be drawn mainly to this small subselection of all women
3) consequently, men who were more likely to choose women in this younger reproductive window might have been selected for;
4) some portion of these men (due to natural variation), in being drawn to the paedomorphic features of women, actually are "steered too low" in preferential age genetically and are thus born having to deal with this unfortunate proclivity.
Ethical question: If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem?
It's often assumed that only females have a "biological clock." Maybe that's not true. Maybe males start to crave offspring too, and some mistake these feelings for sexual attraction.
Then its not a problem.
Or is Japan already doing that? >..<
No.
Neoteny in humans apply to both males and females and apply not only to physical appearance, but also behavior. You can compare with other primates – Chimps can be very friendly until they reach adulthood, when they become less social and more aggressive.
The secondary characteristics develop at puberty on both sexes, they are just different.
In fact, there is a reason why they develop past a certain age. The individuals we are discussing here are not going to be selected for this trait, as they would not be able to reproduce.
> Ethical question: If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem?
No. Because the reason people are prosecuted is that, at some point, someone has been harmed. There are some very disturbing (to my senses) cartoons out there. No-one is jailed for drawing or viewing cartoons in any democratic society.
You’re suggesting someone is born a pedophile?
So there is definitely a genetic input, and it is definitely large, although it's not the whole story.
Partly. Orientation is something like 75% genetic based on identical-twins-raised-separately studies. Why would I assume any particular orientation would be any different, without supporting evidence? Because the prospect of a world where people are born with such a proclivity is emotionally upsetting for you?
It seems to me that this hypothesis is unlikely. Is there any evidence that: 1) Sexual preference is genetic? (It seems intuitive that women whose bodies exhibit extremely visual traits of reproduction would be selected for. However, I don't the connection between that and there being equivalent selective pressure on men to be attracted to that). i.e. where is the gene that makes men attracted to young women specifically, and how and why is that under selective pressure?
2) Is there any evidence that pedophilia isn't a mental disorder caused by something else? Hormone imbalance? Developmental deficiency?
However, your theory does explain why so many more men than women are pedophiles, although it seems entirely inadequate at explaining the few number of women pedophiles that do exist.
Either way, it's a curious and interesting point. Thank you for making it.
In my opinion it's far more
Not all states will respect that so yes chainanalysis software will have to be updated to account for that and it does affect the fungibility
As much as I love tech community, it's sad to see how most comments here are discussing the technical details of the case and not enough outraged by it?
> I have never understood the appeal of BitCoin as a means of purchasing or selling illegal materials.
> I don't think Bitcoin can be anonymous if it goes through an exchange.
> This is why you should exchange your Bitcoin to Monero.
> How do they establish the second address's identity?
> good, they could never trace dollars
It's plenty of time. This idea that just increasing sentences indefinitely will improve things is wrong. The endless ratcheting of sentencing is wrong. 20 years seems low only because we've become so desensitized to absurdly long sentences that comparatively this seems low. Americans need to change their relationship with justice and punishment.
Leaving such corrupted/psychopathic people out in public is hopelessly dangerous. ANYONE who has violated a child's life in this way doesn't deserve a second chance. They have spoilt several lives already till now.
Unregulated markets and freeflowing VC money: what could go wrong?
If bitcoin was more widely used - wouldn't it be a dream come true for every wannabe Stasi/Gestapo organization ?
there was a submission here a bit ago regarding canadian banking systems wanting to go no cash, and mandate electronic purchase and payment.
we have seen economic collapse and what it looks like. if physical banknotes are not available, we use cigarettes, vodka, and tampons.
I think those things are fairly untraceable
Also, if you solely receive and send bitcoin outside of an exchange, you can easily remain pseudo-anonymous in that anyone can see that wallet X has received Y bitcoins and send W bitcoins but without a person attached to the wallet, it's useless information.
This is way crypto currencies are regulated at the edges, if fiet to crypto is watched just like any other bank/exchange, then criminal activity has a hard time getting money out. At the end of the day, it's difficult to buy 'real' things; food, clothing, housing with bitcoin.
If this thing were a big enough problem, the government could easily require you to provide a ledger of all the parties you've transacted with (Your wallet is doing book-keeping, how hard would it be for a legitimate user to enter a small memo for every transaction, anyways?)
Failure to provide a ledger, or for your ledger to fail to cross-correlate with that of your counterparty would, of course, imply that you're a criminal.
Unlike cash, bitcoin leaves a very obvious breadcrumb trail, that can, with a bit of legislature, be turned into an incredibly useful tool for LE.
I never trusted the mixers personally. But it was a hot debate item a few years back whether or not law enforcement could track transactions through a mixer.
Its always been my firm belief that a mixer was just automated money laundering and probably puts you up for legal scrutiny as well. But we'll see how the FBI decides to handle those...
The idea that your transactions are mixed up and impossible to track doesn't matter so much if they just assume everybody who uses a mixer is a criminal.
You aren't tracking coins with the ledger, only totals. So address A can have 10 btc, tumbler adds 5 to A, then A transfers 5 to B, 5 to C. If C is an exchange, does it consider that A is still holding 5 tumbled coins? Or does it say B has the tumbled coins? Or does it reject A's offer of 5? Feel free to shift values such as A having 100 BTC, receiving 0.01 tumbled BTC, & wanting to send 1 BTC to exchange
Also hard to track something like A sending tumbled coins to B, which triggers the owner of B to have C send non tumbled coins to D. You can even have this service offered at an exchange rate, so D receives less than B did
A harder solution only allows them to withdraw up to the number of coins you can verify were not tumbled. So if some malicious tumbler deposits 0.000001 coin in your wallet you can convert all but 0.000001 of your wallet's value at an exchange.
Why use monero unless you wanted to hide your transactions? Hiding your transactions is literally illegal in the USA (its called money laundering).
Presumably, the FBI will be able to automatically determine if your BTC came from a Monero exchange.
As for the fbi consdering monero a "money laundering scheme" in the future. They can outlaw it, I guess, but it's like trying to outlaw video and music piracy, it's hard to do in practice.
How does "bisq" provide anonymity to its users? If you're trading BTC, your wallets are still being connected to each other and provably written into the blockchain for all of eternity. Same with Ethereum and other "mainstream" cryptocoins.
If the FBI only cares about "anonymous" coins, like Monero, and ONLY targets those, then all payment processors would "taint" Monero wallets (or any BTC coins which ever touched a Monero-related wallet), and refuse to process them.
Its really not that hard for Monero (or any other minority-coin) to be shut out of the payment processor market and relegated to black-market goods.
What is the purpose of mixing the coins? You only help criminals. Gray-market goods (ex: legal pornography) are already solved by the traditional BTC network without anonymity.
Between KYC (Know your Customer) and other such laws in the USA, it is clear to me that anonymizing your transactions is very much frowned upon by the powers that be. If anything, fully transparent and trackable BTC "in the open" has numerous advantages with regards to being a "good citizen".
And there are legitimate reasons to use monero and bitcoin. Sending money to family in countries such as china, iran, and venezuela is one. Another use is legitimiate "adult entertainment" sites where people don't want their sexual fetishes appearing on a credit card or ending up on a blockchain somewhere where the public can see.
Have you ever actually purchased adult entertainment on a credit card? They are inconspicuous companies that don't exactly flag what fetish you're into. At worst, you get a cover-company that doesn't actually match up to the website name. I dare say that this is a solved problem in the credit-card world.
Worst case scenario: buy Visa / AmEX gift-cards with cash and use that to fund your porn-stash. If you really have someone watching over your credit-card statements that you're worried about. There are very simple means of avoiding the problem in the traditional credit-card world. If credit-cards are available, then no form of cryptocoin is necessary for any kind of anonymity or protection.
> And there are legitimate reasons to use monero and bitcoin. Sending money to family in countries such as china, iran, and venezuela is one.
No, at best, that's a reason to use BTC. No reason to use Monero yet. And furthermore, using BTC to avoid local currency laws is going to probably put you up to scrutiny by the local authorities.
I don't think the US cares about sending money abroad... but China probably cares if you're avoiding their Yuan -> USD restrictions or creating a secondary market to trade Yuan / USD.
When I read stories about "people getting caught using bitcoin", I am baffled as to why they don't do this.
Also, there are other ways of coorelating transactions such as tracking BTC -> XMR amounts and soon-thereafter XMR -> BTC amounts (minus fees)
Anonymity and protection from the Big Bad Government were definitely talking points used by many cryptocurrency enthusiasts. "It can't be banned and can't be seized", rings a bell? Except of course if the Big Bad Government comes knocking at your door and tells you to hand your wallet over "or else".
This part is sort of true. A government can ban fiat <-> BTC conversion but there isn't really a way to stop people from providing services in exchange for BTC.
Bitcoin is more anonymous than a bank transaction. If I buy something with a credit card, they have my credit card number that is easily linked to me. With Bitcoin it is less easy. Unfortunately with Bitcoin once you have been 'revealed' then your transaction 'graph' is then revealed in the public, whereas the credit card doesn't have that problem.
It depends who you want to be anonymous from. Governments can easily get bank transactions, and also they can investigate bitcoin-based crime and then just trace the public ledger.
Businesses will not easily get bank transactions or map general bitcoin addresses to people, but if you use a credit card you tend to have to give them a lot of other matching information such as your name and address, whereas with bitcoin you don't need to give them anything. Assuming there is no delivery involved it can be pretty anonymous. But again if they did happen to pattern match (maybe they have another customer who you have dealt with too) they could join some dots.
But to be safe it's best to assume Bitcoin is not anonymous and that anyone can find out eventually where you have spent your money.
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Bitcoin transactions turned out to be a great deal less private than that, because separate transactions from the same wallet can be linked via the change outputs (unlike separate trades on a ticker tape).
should have used monero
There is a reason that many darknet markets have it as an option and some use it exclusively
Of course it remains to be seen if it really works if some three-letter organization really wants to figure out who you are.
So in its current state, ISPs would only know what someone has launched a Monero wallet at some point in time. Using Monero is completely benign.
In its also current but also upcoming state, Monero clients automatically connect to TOR or I2P. So a Monero node would not know your IP address and an ISP therefore would not either.
Monero exchanges are merely Monero clients, and a Monero client knows its own address, and it knows the address the sender told it to send to which would be the receiver. But neither of these addresses are ever seen on the blockchain, and the receiver's Monero client does not know which address sent to it.
Since the receiver's client doesn't reveal which address sent to it, and there is no passive blockchain sleuthing possible, and the nodes don't see any of this either, there is very little the FBI could do if users are following best practices which are the default behaviors of this network.
Non-default behavior would be users that rely on exchanges exclusively: they send their 2 Monero from one exchange to another exchange. Exchange 1 is an account that belongs to the user, and it knows the address of Exchange 2. Exchange 2 is an account that belongs to the user, and it only has the same balance and transaction id as Exchange 1's send. The FBI happened to have subpoena'd both exchanges and found the same transaction id. Improbable now, but it could happen anytime in the future.
When the user adds their own Monero client into the mix (exchange 1 - client - exchange 2, + time + different amounts), this gets exponentially more difficult as you already need access to the user, the subpoena, and their Monero client. There are many barriers to getting that, especially in the face of benign economic activity, and the blockchain itself doesn't help.
You also aren't supposed to re-use addresses. This is true for Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. It means that an exchange wouldn't even know if you were sending to yourself, one of your other wallets, to a vendor to pay someone, or what. With Monero none of those recipients know who sent to them.
There have been academic 'attacks' on the monero cryptocurrency, but nothing usable in the real world.
As an individual, I can't stop the NSA if they are genuinely out to get me. All I can do is increase the cost enough that random bureaucrats have to get up from their computer, sign a form, and expend some money to do so.
Gotta say though, this is one of the few times I'm glad to see someone too stupid to use proper anonymization tools.
There already have been indictments that happened to involve finding a Monero wallet on a seized computer and the state was unable to discern any information about the current balance or transactions accompanying it
Again this would be another culprit busted because of their known bitcoin transactions, and the other wallets were just found alongside. So it doesn't prove or disprove that starting with a Monero transaction would net results, but it provides an ongoing and improving degree of confidence.