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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-cause-you're-paranoid... dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:29PM (11 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:29PM (#659107) Journal

    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.

    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)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:12PM (#659129)

    Not if the wallet is one-use (and all records of it deleted after you're done)

    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

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:28PM (#659139) Journal

      Doesn't this kind of go against one of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin, that all transactions are reproducible and permanently recorded?

      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)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:12PM (#659182) Homepage
    > Not if the wallet is one-use

    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)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:43PM (#659224) Journal

      My god, have they reinvented write-only memory again?

      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)

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:13AM (#659372) Homepage
        My god, you're completely clueless. Have you not realised that all transactions have two parties? Who cares about the final state of the wallet, once you know, for example by reading the ledger (whose importance you also don't seem to understand), is empty, for example - it's the recipients of the outgoing transactions that you'd now be going after. And those transactions are all documented publically.
        --
        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)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:41AM (#659392) Journal

          Have you not realised that all transactions have two parties?

          I did write

          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.

          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)

            by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:18AM (#659405) Homepage
            What if I told you "using wallets once" was one of the patterns they'd be looking for when trying to detect laundering...

            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)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:41AM (#659407) Journal

              What if I told you "using wallets once" was one of the patterns they'd be looking for when trying to detect laundering...

              And?

              • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:17AM (1 child)

                by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:17AM (#659420) Homepage
                Nothing, don't worry about it, if you want to wear a ronnie reagan latex mask whenever you go to a bank that's just fine.
                --
                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

                  by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:28AM (#659449) Journal
                  One way they looked for subs in the Second World War was to look for torpedo trails. That didn't make it easy to find the subs.
    • (Score: 2) by datapharmer on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:45PM

      by datapharmer (2702) on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:45PM (#659225)

      Ah but there are valuable usss for worm... [soylentnews.org] Less chance for firmware tampering for example.