“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.”
Anyone in the crypto space has known this for years.
Thats why privacy coins like Monero exist
You’re not wrong, but the first words are literally “Just over a decade ago”. It’s not a news article, it’s the story of the research in 2013 which revealed bitcoin isn’t anonymous.
An article in Wired doesn’t speak to the “crypto space”, they speak to your aunt and uncle in Missouri who don’t know about this.
This is the Technology sub on Lemmy, I cant imagine you believe im talking to people in Missouri
St. Louis has a decent tech scene, AT&T used to have their headquarters there. There’s still a large tech presence there, low cost of living drives tech companies to hire there since they can pay lower wages and no one in the area really cares since you can still get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month.
I was being tongue in cheek, I dont disparage any particular state… except Arkansas
I mean I’m an absolute troglodyte when it comes to technology and I’m here too. Hi!
Or pay cash… ultimate “privacy coin”
true, but paying in cash is sort of difficult over the internet.
You can send it via mail, but mail is slow and it could potentially be traced back to you.
How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?
Every time there is a transaction the sender’s funds are mixed together with a bunch of other senders, and the recipients receive their money from this random pool, so there is no direct association between sender/receiver
This has to be the most convoluted way of saying someone clustered wallet addresses of a public blockchain. I’m sure there’s much more to her work, but this beats so much around the bush… I’m not going to speculate on the author’s motivations for this article, I’ll just say I wouldn’t waste (more) time on it.
Transactions are public. But wallet ownership is not.
That’s why it’s widely used in cybercrime. You can make a wallet and authorities may know which wallet receibe the money, but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.
but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.
Impossible using the blockchain itself, but not as impossible when you add more traditional investigative techniques to the mix.
Provided that the exchanges are cooperating (voluntarily or by law).
Why do you think NK and other “impenetrable” countries are so fond of it? It provides them with the means to monetize something otherwise pretty useless: their relative independence and the resulting potential for secrecy.
They are turning into new-age Swiss banks, keeping anyone’s private ledgers private. For a hefty sum.
And one does not need a strong currency to achieve that: other cryptocurrencies are also perfectly usable.
And it becomes much, much easier to track down and remove anonymity the moment real currency transactions are made. Because of KYC requirements, the only way to stay anonymous with crypto is to keep your crypto transactions entirely outside of the real world. Once your digital anonymous currency interacts with real money you’ve not anchored your wallet to your identity.
Which part of public ledger they don’t understand?
The how part.
There should be more education on the difference between “privacy being available if you look for it” VS “privacy being ensured since the beginning and forever no matter what”
Spoiler: the last one does not exists
I knew this in 2007 when I heard about shitcoin. A ledger is a collection of transactions which is widely share, yep sure confedental…
Seriously how stupid can ya be?
