“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”
Anyone in the crypto space has known this for years.
Thats why privacy coins like Monero exist
An article in Wired doesn’t speak to the “crypto space”, they speak to your aunt and uncle in Missouri who don’t know about this.
This is the Technology sub on Lemmy, I cant imagine you believe im talking to people in Missouri
St. Louis has a decent tech scene, AT&T used to have their headquarters there. There’s still a large tech presence there, low cost of living drives tech companies to hire there since they can pay lower wages and no one in the area really cares since you can still get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month.
I was being tongue in cheek, I dont disparage any particular state… except Arkansas
I mean I’m an absolute troglodyte when it comes to technology and I’m here too. Hi!
This has to be the most convoluted way of saying someone clustered wallet addresses of a public blockchain. I’m sure there’s much more to her work, but this beats so much around the bush… I’m not going to speculate on the author’s motivations for this article, I’ll just say I wouldn’t waste (more) time on it.
Transactions are public. But wallet ownership is not.
That’s why it’s widely used in cybercrime. You can make a wallet and authorities may know which wallet receibe the money, but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.
And it becomes much, much easier to track down and remove anonymity the moment real currency transactions are made. Because of KYC requirements, the only way to stay anonymous with crypto is to keep your crypto transactions entirely outside of the real world. Once your digital anonymous currency interacts with real money you’ve not anchored your wallet to your identity.
Which part of public ledger they don’t understand?
The how part.
The main way criminals are caught is when they transfer their crypto to an exchange so they can convert it to cash. Law enforcement will subpoena the exange and ask “Hey, who exchanged 0.7886 bitcoin for cash on this date?” and they will get their identity. Using the public ledger, they will be able to trace the transactions done and show that this person sent money to an address advertised as belonging to a trafficking site, an illegal market, or recieved money from the bad wallet address.
The address owner is anonymous until there is a source of data that ties information the wallet, and often transactions can be used to do that, just as any way to advertise a wallet belongs to you can, or any way to exchange crypto to cash can.
There should be more education on the difference between “privacy being available if you look for it” VS “privacy being ensured since the beginning and forever no matter what”
Spoiler: the last one does not exists
I knew this in 2007 when I heard about shitcoin. A ledger is a collection of transactions which is widely share, yep sure confedental…
Seriously how stupid can ya be?
