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.
Comment on How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Anyone in the crypto space has known this for years.
Thats why privacy coins like Monero exist
Snapz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is the Technology sub on Lemmy, I cant imagine you believe im talking to people in Missouri
Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I was being tongue in cheek, I dont disparage any particular state… except Arkansas
dasgoat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I mean I’m an absolute troglodyte when it comes to technology and I’m here too. Hi!
los_chill@programming.dev 8 months ago
Or pay cash… ultimate “privacy coin”
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I think that such stuff can be a great layer of privacy and can be set up in a diaspora, in a church, in a community, by a rich guy alone.
wikibot@lemmy.world [bot] 8 months ago
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Hawala or hewala (Arabic: حِوالة ḥawāla, meaning transfer or sometimes trust), originating in India as havala (Hindi: हवाला), also known as havaleh in Persian, and xawala or xawilaad in Somali, is a popular and informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers (known as hawaladars). They operate outside of, or parallel to, traditional banking, financial channels and remittance systems. The system requires a minimum of two hawaladars that take care of the “transaction” without the movement of cash or telegraphic transfer. While hawaladars are spread throughout the world, they are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Hawala follows Islamic traditions but its use is not limited to Muslims.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^‘optout’.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
otter@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?
bjorney@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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
stown@sedd.it 8 months ago
Automated money laundering.
fluxion@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes I laundered some of my salary from work. don’t report me please.
prole@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I mean, pretty much yeah. I think it’s super clever and elegant, but I’m not going to lie to myself about what the main purpose for something like that would be.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
This is not quite correct. You do not have to involve anybody else in your transaction. What happens is the protocol takes a random selection of 15 other people who have spent money and adds them to a ring so that your transaction could be any one of 16 different outputs. But there is no mixing of funds involved.
prole@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Monero is fucking genius actually, I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it, it’s actually incredible.
Basically, they’ve created a way to make the entire thing opaque. Even the people sending the coin are unable to identify the person they’re sending to.
I don’t hold any Monero, because I don’t see it as a good investment (no way governemnts allow something that powerfully opaque to thrive), but I respect the technology.
tourist@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it
Could most people understand it if they took the time or did the white paper require several niche latex packages to compile
skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
your fake internet points are routed via north korean money laundering scheme
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
And yet, crypto bros love pushing the false narrative that bitcoin is an untraceable currency of the future.
In reality, anyone that’s looked into crypto in all its popular forms knows it’s just a ponzi scheme.
lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
It’s so braindead. The entire point of Bitcoin is that it’s 100% traceable
my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 8 months ago
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.
520@kbin.social 8 months ago
It wasn't a revelation in 2013 either. The ledger data has always been public information.
massive_bereavement@kbin.social 8 months ago
But neither the addresses nor the people who had them where. It would be like saying that you can identify someone from an arp table because you can see the mac addresses.
Unless you know specifically who own said address (even to the point that those can be spoofed) you just have a big pile of wet paper.
520@kbin.social 8 months ago
Plenty of ways to identify people from their spending habits.
There are also plenty of ways to connect the address to the person. You can subpoena a legit vendor they've paid with that address, for example.
prole@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Unless I’m mistaken, you still can’t unless you are using an on/off-ramp with AML/KYC.
At this point, the only real way to avoid that would be peer-to-peer transactions. Basically meeting someone in person and trading your crypto for physical cash.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Bitcoin was designed with the theory that the ledger would be public, but that various techniques would make it very hard to get anything useful out of that ledger other than the fact that a payment went through. These included change addresses so a single payment resulted in 2 transactions to 2 random-seeming addresses. This is described as a “key privacy feature of bitcoin”. But, if you can identify which addresses are change addresses and which aren’t, that privacy is compromised. That’s one of the techniques she developed.
Bitcoin transactions having multiple inputs and multiple outputs was also supposed to be a privacy feature, but it had the drawback of making it easier to cluster addresses as being related.
Basically, the bitcoin devs / early bitcoin enthusiasts thought that despite having a public ledger, they could use security by obscurity as a privacy measure, but Sarah Meiklejohn figured out ways of unraveling that process so it was much easier to trace transactions and the owners of wallets.