this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
260 points (85.3% liked)

Technology

59594 readers
3376 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
260
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity (www.wired.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
89 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"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."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

I think people confuse anonymity (similar to the made up names we use here, or character names in online games, and your wallet ID in a crypto coin) to privacy. Technically, if you receive all your funds in crypto, and you spend all the crypto directly (on goods and services that do not require you to give any PII) without it ever turning to fiat. Then yes, it is anonymous but not private. People can see that wallet hash x received funds from wallet hash y and send some of that to wallet hash z and will be able to confirm that for as long as a copy of the ledger exists somewhere.

Really not sure a codebreaker needed to work this out. Anyone that spent a bit of time understanding how it worked would realise this right away. I have no doubt though, that many people had a total pikachu face when their barely concealed illegal activities were easily discovered.