Re:Sheep Marketplace closes after theft of £3m in bitcoins
by alandarev on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @03:47AM
(#6845734)
Thus, whole bitcoin user base will be thrown into a jail if the Sheep Marketplace owner is smart enough to spend significant time parsing his coins around.
Nawww, that is unrealistic, even for FBI.
Re:Sheep Marketplace closes after theft of £3m in bitcoins
by ye on Monday December 02, 2013 @05:23PM
(#6837007)
Well that was just a simple example with round numbers. In reality you will have thousands and thousands of such transactions all going to seemingly random wallets with random amounts, and then to ten thousand different ones, back and forth. They will look like real transactions too.
You can't possibly track something like that. Most wallets don't have any names attached to them.
And even in this simple example you don't know who F, X and Z are and how to find them. They are just wallet numbers.
For instance, let's say that A wants to send bitcoins stolen from G to X and B wants to send other bitcoins to Z. G simply approaches F and says "You stole my bitcoins. As punishment, I'm going to chain you to a mattress in a 6x6 cell until you confess." That leaves F two choices. F can stand for his principles, keep quiet, and serve as an object lesson to all other potential anonymizers.
However, if F doesn't want to slowly go mad from a lack of mental stimulation, then F would probably keep detailed accounting records of each transaction and pass them on to G. G might feel gracious and upgrade F to a 10x10 cell with a window.
Granted, most of these options are available with cash, but you don't have the transaction record which shows you who F is. In this way, bitcoin is easier to trace than cash.