News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Former FBI Director Said Blockchain Is Easier to Trace Than Paper Money. Parent comment

Re:Former FBI Director Said Blockchain Is Easier to Trace Th... by sph on Monday October 17, 2022 @10:37AM (#33234084)
Yes, I edited it out from my comment because I knew someone would point that out and I didn't really want to go on a tangent about it. I meant it's untraceable by some very narrow definitions of tracing.

You'd know that hex address X sent money to Y, but you wouldn't necessarily know that X is John Doe that lives at 1234 Main St., nor you'd be able to tell that, knowing address X, John Doe also owns address Z.

With KYC laws you have a lot more metadata to be able to do correlations like that, but I'm specifically talking about the protocol and the technology itself.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Former FBI Director Said Blockchain Is Easier to Trace Th... by simiones on Monday October 17, 2022 @11:31AM (#33234931)
It's important though to mention that you don't need KYC to attach a real identity to a bitcoin wallet. It's harder to do at scale, but if you're interested in finding the bitcoin wallet(s) of a specific person, or the person behind a specific wallet, this can be done with analysis of the blockchain itself and information from other parties to their transactions (which include their ISP, the ISP of some Bitcoin nodes where they advertised their transactions, and the seller sending them physical goods if they are using BTC for that). Also, if a BTC wallet is linked to a physical identity at any time, all past transactions of that physical identity can generally be discovered, often even if they are using separate wallets.
[ Parent | on HN ]