Quote from: Kakmakr on April 04, 2018, 06:20:27 AM

Quote from: Seetheummerallyeah on April 03, 2018, 09:58:15 PM

Quote from: Kakmakr on April 03, 2018, 06:29:57 AM

There are so many ways of hiding the destination of the scammers coins that it is virtually impossible to trace it. A lot of sites on the internet will allow you to register without KYC/AML requirements and you can push those coins through these services. They also allow you to change the sender address, to withdraw from their services and some even mix your coins.

A lot of these sites goes down and then resurface under a new domain, so you cannot trace any logs, because they are destroyed or not even logged by these sites. A lot of people open multiple accounts, which makes this even more difficult to follow.

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

If you ONLY deal from bitcoin to bitcoin it is possible to remain anonymous... the problem is that most people, at some point, buy bitcoin with fiat. If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

Wow, so if that is true... Why are we not seeing government agencies arresting all the people who bought drugs on Silkroad or why are most of the money still untraceable that were hacked on the many exchanges that was exploited over the years?

Why did they not arrest the owner of the biggest Bitcoin mixer service that closed down a while ago? < Bitmixer.io > Huh

Bitcoin is for the most part anonymous, if you use it correctly and that is why government agencies are so against it. You can use other Alt coins like Monero and ZCash and Dash, but a lot of those coins are sold for Bitcoin in the end.

I think there is a fine line between what a high-level, over-funded governement agency like the NSA, the NKVD or the mossad *could potentially* do, and what they *will* do...
It's not a tale of what's technically possible, but about which level of paranoid you are, and about the odds of being the victim of a (mostly) 3 letter agency.

For example, take this article from 2014, written after a journalist dug into snowden's documents: https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/16/nsa-bugged-cisco-routers/
Combine the fact that a gov agency *could* bug the routers at your datacenter, they *could* have backdoors in the drivers on your servers, they *could* have bugs in your house, they *could* have installed spyware on your pc, they *could* have planted 50% of the current network's nodes (including the one on the darknet), they *could* be running the marjority of the mixers themselfs, they *could* have written algorithms running on big supercomputers having loaded all kind of blockchains in order to find links, they *could* have penetrated the dev groups of many opensource security tools to install backdoors, they *could* analyse all data from all ISPs and datacenters of the US and the EU if they use the proper legal channels,....

However, you should ask yourself "am i interesting enough for them to go trough all this effort in order to reveil my identity".

I truely believe that if they really, really, really wanted to find the person behind, for example, bitmixer.io, they could *probably* do this... However, the cost would probably be enormous... It would probably take them thousands of manhours, external contractors, bugging hardware, illegally entering houses, asking for searchwarrants, cooperating with or forcing other governements to allow access to certain data,....
In the end, the cost vs the outcome would probably not be in balance.

I also think that if you want privacy, and you use a combination of at least 3 anonimizing methods over tor and/or VPN, the odds of a governement agency deciding it's worth their effort to unmask you are really low, especially if you're not doing anything wrong to begin with. Personally, i sometimes use 1 mixing service... Even if it would eventually turn out this service is owned by the governement, i wouldn't be worried anyways... Mixing my coins is just a way to make sure nobody knows how much BTC i own (hint: not a lot)

BTW: a last remark: the way i understand it, bitcoin was never meant to be 100% anonymous to begin with, Satoshi left it up to the user to make sure he used bitcoin in a way that improved his/her privacy.... Satoshi actually wrote this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8.msg34#msg34