SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The NSA Worked to "Track Down" Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal
Internet paranoiacs drawn to Bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, Bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable - while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of Bitcoin's fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something.
Archived: https://archive.fo/z5zzo
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The NSA Worked to "Track Down" Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 35 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:23PM (14 children)
Totally and utterly irrelevant.
The transactions are in the ledger, they've got all the time in the world to trawl through that and taint more and more wallets.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:12PM
That and the transactions aren't real until they become part of the blockchain. No miner is going to include a shitload of $0.10US transactions with no mining fees included in their blocks. When "they" do track you down they'll add money laundering to any other charges they have for you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:29PM (11 children)
Not if the wallet is one-use (and all records of it deleted after you're done) or you use one of the collective services (at your own risk, of course). The real problem is that your money has to get into bitcoins somehow and become something usable on the other end when you're done. That can be attacked more successfully.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Doesn't this kind of go against one of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin, that all transactions are reproducible and permanently recorded? If you can't tell where a Bitcoin came from, what keeps people from just making up their own?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:28PM
No, because reuse of a wallet is not essential to the system or its tenets.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:12PM (8 children)
My god, have they reinvented write-only memory again?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:43PM (6 children)
What's so hard to grasp here? Ledger isn't much good for financial tracking, if the things that are tracked never repeat. Using the same wallet for a bunch of transactions means they all get linked together to whoever is finally determined to possess that wallet at the end. If I use a new wallet for each closed cycle transaction of money into bitcoin and back out again with any record of that wallet deleted on my end, then they will have a hard time linking those transactions to me. Maybe the behavior is sufficiently unique that they can track it that way, but it'll be hard to prove anything in a court of law (though perhaps not hard enough to prevent a search warrant).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:13AM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:41AM (4 children)
I did write
so yes, I did realize that. I also know that knowing one of the two parties to a bitcoin transaction doesn't automatically give you the identity of the other party. Using wallets (which is just software for storing private keys) once means that they'll have a much harder time pinning any patterns on a bitcoin launderer. And since you aren't actually keeping any bitcoins in my proposed scheme, you don't need to store any record of the transfer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:18AM (3 children)
And again, you've overlooked the virality of taint that I mentioned in my very first post.
But don't worry, I'm sure you'd get away with it, because you're smart.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:41AM (2 children)
And?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:17AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:28AM
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:45PM
Ah but there are valuable usss for worm... [soylentnews.org] Less chance for firmware tampering for example.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:52PM
Heh, excluding the wrench attack, until they finish I might be dead after a long fruitful life in an environment with blackjack and hookers.
I'm sure my historians will be delighted of their effort.
Security is a trade-off between the cost of protection vs the cost of the attacker breaking that protection. Even no perfect security can exist, good-enough security may serve the purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford