The European government has spent a few years trying to break encryption. The results have been, at best, mixed. Of course, the EU government claims it’s not actually interested in breaking e…
from the less-safety-equals-more-safety,-say-EuroCops dept
You’ve got a bit of misunderstanding of how bitcoin works, and they definitely aren’t using the juryrigged supercomputer for unmasking. Most likely human analysts and investigators with some minor algorithmic help for analyzing tumbled transactions on the chain.
Bitcoin is inherently traceable. The entire concept of the blockchain originally was to have a distributed ledger of all transactions available and verifiable by anyone, so the banks couldn’t go “no that transaction never happened”.
The anonimity of being able to instantly and freely create wallets with little to no identifying info attached was a side purpose, but not a true purpose. Your wallet is effectively just a username they’d have to find a way to connect to your real identity.
All bitcoin transactions are auditable by anyone.
So most criminals use tumblers, scattering a transaction into irregular pieces that move across a shit ton of wallets before slowly making their way to the actual destination wallet.
But even those are traceable, just difficult. Over time and through seizing black market servers, intelligence agencies can build maps of what wallets match up to what. Sellers leaving donate links in forum signatures, finding the tumbler accounts from a seized market, etc. Then by using external info like knowledge of the payout amount and how many wallets its going to end up in, they can analyze the block chain ledger and connect the dots.
TL;DR- Bitcoin has always been psuedonymous, not actually anonymous, and is more easily traceable than other options by fucking design. You are only as anonymous as the distance between your real identity and your wallet address. Practice proper OpSec for shady business.
You’ve got a bit of misunderstanding of how bitcoin works, and they definitely aren’t using the juryrigged supercomputer for unmasking. Most likely human analysts and investigators with some minor algorithmic help for analyzing tumbled transactions on the chain.
Bitcoin is inherently traceable. The entire concept of the blockchain originally was to have a distributed ledger of all transactions available and verifiable by anyone, so the banks couldn’t go “no that transaction never happened”.
The anonimity of being able to instantly and freely create wallets with little to no identifying info attached was a side purpose, but not a true purpose. Your wallet is effectively just a username they’d have to find a way to connect to your real identity.
All bitcoin transactions are auditable by anyone.
So most criminals use tumblers, scattering a transaction into irregular pieces that move across a shit ton of wallets before slowly making their way to the actual destination wallet.
But even those are traceable, just difficult. Over time and through seizing black market servers, intelligence agencies can build maps of what wallets match up to what. Sellers leaving donate links in forum signatures, finding the tumbler accounts from a seized market, etc. Then by using external info like knowledge of the payout amount and how many wallets its going to end up in, they can analyze the block chain ledger and connect the dots.
TL;DR- Bitcoin has always been psuedonymous, not actually anonymous, and is more easily traceable than other options by fucking design. You are only as anonymous as the distance between your real identity and your wallet address. Practice proper OpSec for shady business.