You cannot refuse a BTC transaction. You could return it in a subsequent transaction, and pay the transaction fee, but I would imagine your address would be forever tainted by a number of illicit address/transaction tracking algorithms.
They'd get less than cashing it all out themselves obviously, but it would take forever to unravel what actually happened (if possible ever)
Politicians are surprisingly cheap, as I've learned over the years from various reports.
Not sure how you'd target a geographical area though.
IANAL, but if crime prescription is possible, you could transfer to 5,000 wallets and keep the rest for your pirate-themed retirement island.
Basically communities freak out when they think founder/team is selling any of the project’s tokens no matter how long its been or whether what the stated vesting conditions were
So we just bundle it in monthly distributions in multisend transactions to new addressses, some of the transactions are monthly vesting payments to marketers, some of the payments are to ourselves. Not possible to distinguish.
(This is also possible because communities also demand that issuers put funds and the tokens into liquidity pools, which is not always compatible with having a ton of other tokens just sitting in separate vesting treasuries. So liquidity pool shares are vesting and they can be sent anywhere and unbundled)
They'd just have to look at anyone unwise enough to use the money instead of turning it over to authorities (or abandoning the wallet).
Many exchanges refuse to accept coins that have passed through a tumbler. If you attempt to deposit these coins, the exchange will refuse to credit you unless you provide copious amounts of documentation. Currently they do not seize your coins but will force you to withdraw them.
Some exchanges are even going through users' deposit histories and are retroactively flagging deposits from coin mixing services: https://twitter.com/kristapsk/status/1374336620158140419
This is why many criminals are moving away from Bitcoin into Monero, which has anonymized transactions and doesn't suffer from the chain analysis problem.
The bad money gets mixed with the good in the exchanges wallet, and sent to random people...
they may not have a choice if the gov't regulation forces them to flag it.
Not if those algorithm are any good.
In Bitcoin, you can’t taint an address just by sending funds to it, since all transactions to the same address create separate “outputs” that must be redeemed separately.
Edit: This post is being downvoted by people who don't want it to be true. Sorry folks, it is. Bitcoin is UTXO-based, and every output sent to your address is a unique piece of mail. If you don't like that, use an account-based system where it all gets mixed together.
There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is.
I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)
If there were money in it, someone would throw OCR at the problem. Say, attach prizes to certain bills, or finding certain patterns of bills (say, two bills whose serial numbers are mathematically related a certain way).
You can still play that game with new coins, but it’s less f visible now, as most coins are old and those already are well dispersed throughout the euro zone (and, of course, more and more people pay with a card)
If the banks track serial numbers, they could probably build a fairly complete picture of what kind of transactions are going on. With the vast amount of data, you could probably fill in a lot of the gaps.
ATMs might already be recording serial numbers
Say John gets bills from the ATM then pays dealer Dylan for weed. Dylan then buys a beer at a bar.
If Dylan gets convicted, and banks collaborate with the police, then John gets subjected to - at least - parallel reconstruction.
You don’t punish someone based on chance.
There is no need for it to be trustless and distributed.
If the police arrest suspected criminals and find money that can be traced back to criminal activity, they’ll confiscate it (permanently only after a trial). “Traced back” typically need not even involve checking serial numbers. If you’ve a lot of cash, but no regular job that explains how you could have that much money or why you would keep it in cash, that’s enough to confiscate it.
If, on the other hand, they find John Doe in possession of a banknote that was paid out in a ransom or stolen from a bank, and cannot link John Doe to any crime, John Doe can keep the money (they’ll ask him whether he knows where he got it and may be able to force him to exchange it for untainted money, but that’s it)
(Counterfeit money is different. If the police finds you in possession of it they’ll confiscate it, even if they know that you’re a victim)
https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/fungibility....
Monero protects the service provider, but doesn't solve the other problems.
There is a real possibility that in the future, all stolen assets will eventually be recovered and returned to their owners. There needn't be any limit to recovery given a universal, traceable, and non-fungible transaction log. Pretty soon payment processors/recipients would start maintaining blacklists of stolen coins which they refuse to transact in.
The value proposition of theft/fraud may be significantly curtailed in such a world.
(Though to be fair, people simply losing the private keys to their wallet also has the same effect. Not sure which phenomenon would, over time, result in more coin losses.)
Just as a point of reference, the current median tx price in USD is ~$12, next block confirmations currently cost in excess of 100+ satoshis/byte and the median tx size is ~250 bytes.
If your security is bad or you want the state to prosecute hackers in your defense, you can keep using traditional banks, Bitcoin, etc. If you want complete freedom and you trust your security, use Monero.
Total outsider here, asking honestly.
Like all blockchain analysis, following the conversion process always assumes that all addresses involved are tainted forever because its also assuming it is under custody of the thief, so if you really want to play along further and think that this is both true and that the thief needs to hide then the thief can just drop all the converted assets into Tornado.cash and take them out later.
Even if you think that cashing out Tornado.cash is hard, they can always just pump the price of some other token that they already bought with clean funds, and those cleans funds just become highly-profitable-trader-clean-funds. While the addresses with tornado.cash sourced funds are just bagholding whatever token they bought.
So if you got tainted coin sent to your address, you could avoid using that UTXO in future TXs.
That might protect you from some scrutiny.
Yep, this is referred to as “coin control”
when a block is mined, an output is created, outputs can only be spent once. a bitcoin transaction is just a list of existing outputs (inputs) and new outputs to create (outputs). each output is created with a lock script, to spend the output you must provide the unlock script which normally contains at least a signature and a public key
returning the output that corresponds to the unwanted transaction should do
Cash is more fungible, yet you can also link serial numbers on bills back to ransom payments.
In a similar fashion, if you, even unknowingly, pay with counterfeit cash, you won’t get reimbursed for the face value, if it gets detected.
Back to crypto, Monero addresses the aforementioned issues through stealth addresses, ring signatures and ringCTs, thus fungibility of the token is higher.
Even unknowingly receiving stolen money or property leaves you on the hook, potentially. If the rightful owner tracks it to you they can go "that's mine!" and the courts will order you to give it to them. The loss you incur here is yours; the law treats it as an incentive to be diligent and to not deal in stolen goods.
You can of course then try to recover the value you are owed from the person who sent you the stolen goods/money, if you want/can. And they from whoever sold them the stolen goods/money. And so on, all the way back to the original thief. The whole chain is tainted. (Pun intended, maybe.)
I don't believe that's true, though this is based on just stuff I've heard, not on any data I can present. In general I hear that if someone steals something, and then sells it to you, and you don't know (and have no reason to believe) it was stolen, not only are you not legally liable, but you cannot be forced to return the property to the original owner.
If this wasn't the case, the act of buying anything through a private sale would in general be pretty risky.
This goes pretty far sometimes: I remember a somewhat bizarre case where someone sold some land to someone, and lied to the buyer about where the property line was. The new owner built on what was technically someone else's land, but later the "true" owner lost in court, and the owner who built on it was given ownership rights, and I don't believe was required to compensate the "true" owner. (I imagine the "true" owner had a strong case against the lying seller, though.)
Sounds like a case of adverse possession, which is a special feature of real property law not shared with personal property.
So, while that story is plausible, its not something you should generalize to non-real-estate law.
There are many stories of bills being marked in specific ways to to identify their provenance.
It's a crime to spend money you do not own. Like if you would find 500k in paper bills in your car. There is no source of funds it would be your legal asset. You hand it over to police.
'finding' is ofcourse situational, but abandoned property can be 'found' and claimed
I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills