That's an interesting angle to cash out... just start sending to 1,000s of addresses - who's to say which addresses are owned by the criminals, and which are owned by other people?

They'd get less than cashing it all out themselves obviously, but it would take forever to unravel what actually happened (if possible ever)

You could use also do that to embarrass/blackmail politicians or other prominent people. Imagine the threat "You either do what I want or I'll send you 1 million dollars" :)

What politicians accept Bitcoin as donations?

I think whole bunch of them do, Eric Swalwell accepts like 6 of them.

Wasn't that the one associated with a known CCP spy? https://www.axios.com/china-spy-california-politicians-9d2df...

More like "targeted by."

6 bitcoins?

BTC plus five altcoins, I imagine is what he meant.

How else do you suppose they pay for their crimes?

Just tell them you're willing to donate them more than $5K and they'll figure it out.

Politicians are surprisingly cheap, as I've learned over the years from various reports.

How about universal basic income? Send some to everyone monthly. Would be curious the social implications of elicit money used as a welfare utility.

Yes, look forward to my $20 check that lasts one month.

I'd take that over still not receiving a stimulus check despite needing them more than ever.

Yea, my comment was more that $7.5B is $1 per person in the world or $20 for people in the US. Nowhere near something to be considered UBI. I hope you get the assistance you need.

Okay so I was actually thinking based on wallet counts (64 million currently) I agree it still doesn’t go too far

You don't need to start with an entire country, start with a city or state. Then steal more.

Not sure how you'd target a geographical area though.

Don't worry, the printer is just out of ink. They're coming soon!

I know of plenty of people who consider taxes "elicit money", and we spend that money EVERYWHERE

Send it to 7,500 random wallets, including your own, and you can keep as many millions as wallets you have. Most people will keep the money, making them indistinguishable from your own wallets.

IANAL, but if crime prescription is possible, you could transfer to 5,000 wallets and keep the rest for your pirate-themed retirement island.

We’ve done that on a number of projects

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)

I had the same idea, and it would be funny, but investigators wouldn't have to unravel the whole thing.

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).

Most people wouldnt actually know that the money is illicit

Almost nobody would turn to authorities, people just think it's their lucky day and spend it, so they would target a lot of innocent people.

What'd you really do is just send it to a liquidity smart contract and use a function parameter to send it to different wallet(s). These pools pay out big money to alot of different wallets, you'd never be able to track it out the other side.

They could just setup their own Bitcoin tumbler

Tumbling on bitcoin doesn't work like it used to a few years ago. There are now multiple companies dedicated to blockchain tracking and analysis. All coins coming from tumblers are flagged. It's possible because the bitcoin blockchain is public and every balance and transaction is visible to the whole world.

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.

So if someone buys a stick of gum from me after taking rent money from a tainted BTC address, I get flagged?

It only takes a few exchanges refusing to flag coins and the whole flagging system fails.

The bad money gets mixed with the good in the exchanges wallet, and sent to random people...

> a few exchanges refusing to flag coins

they may not have a choice if the gov't regulation forces them to flag it.

Currency of the future

If tumblers are a problem, why wouldnt monero be? You could view it just as a BTC that has built-in tumbler. I dont really follow this logic of Monero shills. Exchanges can ban both tumblers AND monero.

So can you poison someones wallet if you send them 1 satoshi that’s from a tumbler?

Came here to ask about this… Does anyone know whether this has happened before?

This is essentially what a tumbler does

The suggestion is a philanthropic variation of a tumbler.

Pretty sure what they mean is 'do you refuse it as payment?' - i.e. should you provide the thing someone is paying for or send the payment back and ask for untainted coins?

> […] but I would imagine your address would be forever tainted by a number of illicit address/transaction tracking algorithms.

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.

If I send you a stolen iPod in the mail, do I forever taint your home address? Are you forced to accept it? No, of course not. You can return it to the police, throw it out, or return it to the sender. If you keep it and use it, then it becomes your problem. The same is true for Bitcoin. You can refuse any transaction output. You are not your address.

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.