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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

> Modern forensics techniques make Bitcoin's pseudonymous nature more or less irrelevant.

How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous.

And before you say "yeah but nobody does that", I do that and a lot of people in my country do that.

> Worse, anti-censorship only extends within Bitcoin itself. The moment Bitcoin has to touch traditional financial networks it becomes more easily censorable.

I don't see the point here? If it's no longer bitcoin then of course it's properties don't apply anymore.

By the way I don't consider Bitcoin specifically a good replacement because it's not scalable, but my point applies to other potentially similar but scalable cryptocurrencies (maybe ETH in the future if they figure out scalability)

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> If I buy some bitcoin face to face, and receive it on a brand new address (not reusing addresses was something that satoshi himself emphasized ever since bitcoin came out) it's highly anonymous.

It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

This is fairly rudimentary forensics work, and an unmaskable, centralized store of all transactions makes it trivial.

> I don't see the point here?

"Anti-censorship" properties that are worthless in real-world usage seem to be a fairly important flaw if we're talking about a technologies anti-censorship properties.

> It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

How is that? Let's say I go to PornHub and purchase premium (which is only purchasable with crypto). Assume tor usage to not have to worry about any kind of side channel identity leak. How could PornHub know who I am? At most, if the person who sold me the crypto face to face messed up and the address he used to send me the coins becomes identified, PornHub could assume

A) This is another address of his

B) This is the address of someone he conducted business with

Either way you would need to personally inquire him to leak my identity, in case he even knows it.

And this is assuming a trivial case without the use of mixers and so on.

Ideally you would want your wallet software to automatically handle all this stuff, and automatically clean your coins for you, generate new addresses, etc without you even knowing.

As with any thing OpSec, all it takes is one mistake to make your digital footprint clear.

I do not have the time or expertise to explain all the ways in which blockchain forensics is able to trace identities and ownership, but behold, it's an entire industry now. And isn't that much different from other forms of forensic accounting, which has been tracing money through labyrinths of shell companies and offshore accounts for decades.

If you believe, "Well, I used a new address! And a mixer! I'm safe!", that entire industry would like to have words with you.

This is a Bitcoin transaction that was made recently: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/2ade2fbc7260f7000696953d4f...

How much can you tell us about the sender and recipient, please?

I'm not a forensic accountant.

This like someone pointing out that there are doctors who can cure a mild infection and then demanding that person heal your infection immediately.

You said that you could in your comment:

> It's only "anonymous until use". If you transfer some amount to me, I can then retroactively find its source, and likely find a good deal of information about you and the other wallets you've used.

Regardless, obviously you can't. And no forensic accountant can either. I think you're just misinformed. You can draw some unreliable statistical relationships between adresses but that's it. And schemes like CoinJoin makes that sort of analysis even more irrelevant.

There's an entire industry of people and court filings that disagree with you.

So we've gone from "you", to a "forensic accountant" and now to "law enforcement".

If by industry, you mean blockchain analysis software vendors, I'm well aware of them. It is snake oil meant to tick an AML checkbox and appear as though you are doing something to fight money laundering. It's pure security theater.

Regarding law enforcement, they can't simply link Bitcoin addresses to real identities. It's just not possible. What happens is that some criminals are dumb enough to volunteer their real identity to exchanges and get caught that way.

> How so? If I buy some bitcoin face to face [blah blah]

You just described the benefits of a cash transaction. If the government is your adversary in this scenario, what's stopping them from cutting network access and rendering your Bitcoin immobile? Starlink and solar panel? For everyone?

I'm really getting sick of this libertarian drivel.

> You just described the benefits of a cash transaction.

Nobody is denying cash is good. But cash relies on the government issuing it, can't be sent through the internet, can't be transported across borders easily, or in large quantities, can be physically seized, etc.

> If the government is your adversary in this scenario what's stopping them...

Yeah and what's stopping them from throwing you in jail? Or just killing you?

I'm assuming an intermediate point here, in which the government isn't either fully libertarian/anarchist, neither fully authoritarian. Which is what most "free" countries are like nowadays.

If the government is fully authoritarian and you're an "adversary" you're fucked.

Bitcoin hasn't seen large scale, transactional adoption anywhere, but especially not in any "free" country, where Bitcoin's advantages aren't outweighed by its disadvantages outside of illicit usage.

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