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How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity (www.wired.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.