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Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by lazzlazzlazz on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @06:21PM (#25853234)
Yellen said:

> "Many [cryptocurrencies] are used, at least in a transactions sense, mainly for illicit financing."

Chainalysis, a firm that does compliance and criminal research professionally for governments, says that the total funds received by criminal entities is only 0.34% of all activity in crypto.[1]

Hopefully the department does its due diligence and realizes that rhetoric is diverging from reality.

[1]: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...

Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by jcranmer on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @06:43PM (#25853416)
I'm somewhat skeptical of the analysis when it revised the share of criminal activity in 2019 from 1.1% to 2.1%--in other words, more than doubling that value. That revision is on the basis of "the identification of more addresses associated with criminal activity that were active in 2019."

Your citation that it's "only 0.34%" is a somewhat dishonest distillation, because the report itself advises that the number is only for known criminal activity, and that the number is expected to rise over time as well.

What I would instead like to see, and that this report does not illuminate at all, is a breakdown of how all transactions looks. How many transactions are related to cryptocurrency-specific transactions, such as mixing coins or moving between hot wallets and cold wallets? How many transactions are related to speculation (e.g., trading one cryptocurrency for another)? How many transactions are associated with known entities, e.g. the Bitcoin address of an online (non-darknet) marketplace? How many transactions are unclassified?

Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by lazzlazzlazz on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @10:39PM (#25855086)
Even if 90% of illicit financing transactions are being missed by Chainalysis, the original claim is that "many are used [...] mainly for illicit financing" is outright false.
Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by MarkMc on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @08:09PM (#25854096)
By 'transactions sense' I think Yellen means using cryptocurrency to buy and sell goods and services. The Chainalysis figure seems to include people simply swapping USD for Bitcoin. So in that sense Yellen may be correct
Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by fat_pikachu on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:39AM (#25858647)
She's using it as a pretext for when they eventually ban or regulate crypto to death, not to genuinely inform anyone.
Re:Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryp... by anm89 on Thursday January 21, 2021 @01:36AM (#25856169)
I sincerely doubt she cares what the data says in this case. She's building a narrative.