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Re:Illicit activity a tiny part of cryptocurrency use by NovemberWhiskey on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:21PM (#29830374)
That's not the point at all - every transaction on a distributed ledger can be tracked. It's not necessary to know ownership of an account to know whether a transaction is illicit; for example, a theft from an exchange or a hack on a DeFi contract.
Re:Illicit activity a tiny part of cryptocurrency use by pydry on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:24PM (#29830418)
It depends on the crime. If I bought drugs on a darknet exchange how would the researcher know to include that in the 0.15%?

They don't. Not unless, e.g. that exchange gets busted and leaks all of its data.

This title should really be "easily identified illicit transactions constitute 0.15% of trading volume".

Which I'd say counts as a lot.

Re:Illicit activity a tiny part of cryptocurrency use by spicybright on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:25PM (#29830434)
Those kinds of heists are probably 1% of illicit transactions. We're talking more about buying drugs and exchanging crypto between two seemingly clean wallets.
Re:Illicit activity a tiny part of cryptocurrency use by periheli0n on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:50PM (#29830766)
OK, in that case "illicit" is defined as related to fraud in the crypto exchange itself. It does not refer to activities like e.g. buying banned substances, oligarchs circumventing sanctions, etc.

If this is really the message of the article, then it is misleading, perhaps even deliberately so, to make crypto look good.

Re:Illicit activity a tiny part of cryptocurrency use by gtvwill on Thursday January 06, 2022 @04:59PM (#29830898)
That's a very narrow definition of an illicit transaction. I mean you seem to ignore simple facts like how ownership alone can dictate if a transaction is illicit.

Bit hard to tell me your not sending money to foreign nation States or supporting terrorism if you can't prove you know the identity of owners of the accounts your transacting with.