From TFA "The FBI has not, however, been able to identify the hitman as yet. The reason is almost certainly because the hitman did not use a commercial service like Coinbase, which must comply with know-your-customer laws, for the Bitcoin transactions but instead relied on his own personal wallet—one that did not reveal any information about his identity."
If they try to convert to fiat via an exchange, they can be identified the same way the husband was. If they try to buy products directly without using fiat then it is harder for law enforcement to get the records they need, but still quite possible.
They will probably be safe if they never touch the bitcoin, but that entirely defeats the purpose of using it
An asumption you're making and likely untrue. There are many ways to convert to fiat or skip that step and luander through the dark web
Usually, one'd use a coin like Monero instead, the project's wretched history notwithstanding.
I can see a lot of value in it though, just like how I see value in Freenet, I2P, Tor and other such overlay networks.
(not implying that the bbc gave him any money)
Even if you escape the statute of limitations, there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century.
IMO, the only "surefire" way to launder bitcoin is traditional money laundering: send a trusted person dirty bitcoins and they send you back bitcoins from a clean legitimate source. Strong incentive for launderer to take the funds and run, so trust is unstable in this model.
That's all of the internet, forget blockchains.
Even if you are talking about dragnet collection and you assume that for example NSA can store all traffic on the internet (which is basically impossible) in Utah (or wherever) for future decryption with post-quantum cryptography there is no reason to believe that they would make it public. And that is basically the worst case scenario.
Privacy fatalism helps no-one.
Reddit is not unique. People do this with Twitter too. I forget the name but there's an entire service for caching changes to your Twitter bio.
> No, it isn't, if a service is properly secured and does not sell it's data then there is no reason to think this
Citation needed. Reddit and Twitter aren't selling data to those people. It's an open API.
We may be talking about different things, but to me "all of the internet" means much more than public data and public forums.
I think privacy is something we should strive for, but I think that when something is said publically on a globally broadcasted medium people cannot reasonably have an expectation of privacy. The problem with privacy in my mind is when there can reasonably be an expectation of privacy but that isn't met.
If I tweet something it's clear that's public. If I DM someone that should be private.
Why is it reasonable to not expect that there would be someone saving public data?
Facebook had created puppet profiles from people's contact information and made them public, notoriously.
Like, at what point would you like to accept that GPs statement is not hyperbole? Would all information that was private need to go public? By then I'd say it is too late.
This is a rather silly argument where you try to draw some line in online services that has been willfully greyed by the people who create these platforms for their own benefit.
If you want to call GP a privacy fatalist, then I'll just call you a privacy denialist and leave it there.
Is it so absurd to say that if I post stuff publically I cannot expect it to be private and if I post stuff privately I should absolutely be able to depend on it to be private?
I think your example of parler is an example of a service that was not adequately secured to protect it's private communications and the facebook example is clearly unethical and just one of the reasons I don't use the service.
We can only speculate that data breaches will be used for such purposes eventually too.
The best you can get is E2EE communications. I find it ironic someone commenting on a text based public forum would argue this.
> The best you can get is E2EE communications.
There are quite a lot of steps between public data and E2EE.
> I find it ironic someone commenting on a text based public forum would argue this.
I don't have any expectation of privacy here and know what I'm saying is public. On other sites/services I have privacy and know that what I'm saying isn't public.
"Everything stays on the internet forever" is a good cautionary principle, but isn't a strict reality.
Is this why we've successfully caught every single ransomware operation transacting in crypto?
Humm. I suppose that there aren't very many of them. Perhaps cryptocurrencies do make some forms of criminal enterprises much easier to operate. I'm willing to accept that 'Hitman for hire' might not be one of them, though - mostly because you need a local presence, at which point, taking payment in cash has a number of advantages.
It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
You still need to be local to perform the assassination, but the time and location are still vague. It's basically "somewhere the person will be at some point in the future". Makes it a lot harder to stage a sting because you can't have people set up everywhere that person will be at all times.
We're also not terribly far away from remote assassinations being possible. There was an assassination in Iran that allegedly used a computer to control a machine gun to kill someone. Combine that with a self-driving car, or a remotely operated car, and you've got a hitman mobile. Or the cheap and low-tech route, strapping explosives to drones. The cartels have already started using them, so it's not improbable that you could pilot one across the world. Pay the cartel to set up a drone and give you the credentials to control it and you don't even have to leave your home.
> It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
I don't think that's really true. At the scale of money we're talking about, hiring a courier to handcuff the money to their wrist and fly across the world wouldn't be an excessive cost. The primary downside is the same; there's a known location where the money will be left and picked up.
It's not impossible to use the regular banking system for crime. But it's a lot harder, and a lot easier to get caught. A cartel in Mexico with an annual income in billions might be able to bribe or threaten the right people, but some techie running a small call center is going to have a harder time.
Why do you think ransomware groups always accept bitcoin?
It certainly can be safe and pseudo anonymous. Just need to be careful about fiat on/off ramps and maybe use a mixer or two. These things are not hard to do.
The person who used Coinbase was either lazy or ignorant
Wouldn't that be enough for him to be able to say "no i just bought some weed sorry, jail me for a month. i dont know why that person then went on to try to kill my wife."?
Who would believe that story?
Seems like they'd need to seize the hitman's digital communications, at which point the jig is probably already up.
A grand jury must look through the evidence and conclude that there is enough there to possibly result in a conviction.
Some ground-laying patents have been filed by CipherTrace, but I think it speaks for itself that the IRS's $625,000.00 bounty on tracing Monero still stands.
Your last-mile exchange from bitcoin back to USD on Coinbase, for example, is logged and monitored by Coinbase -- furthermore, the bank is incentivized to file Suspicious Activity Reports whenever they see these large wire transfers to the virtual banks used by the exchanges for withdrawing and depositing fiat. So, even privacy coins are tracked in this way (these necessary fiat exchanges).
You can basically say the same thing about IRS tracking crypto tax evaders.