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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.
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The NSA Worked to "Track Down" Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday.
(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.