Quote from: carlfebz2 on September 18, 2018, 05:40:06 PM

Quote from: deisik on September 17, 2018, 01:59:11 PM

Quote from: Argoo on September 17, 2018, 02:09:52 AM

Quote from: FXTradingPro on August 12, 2018, 10:18:07 PM

BTC us getting a much-improved image as US law enforcement acknowledges that BTC criminal use has declined dramatically.

https://forexmarketslive.com/bitcoin-not-the-choice-of-criminals-anymore/

A new study recently conducted in the European Union showed that bitcoin is used with an illegal target in just 0.67 percent of cases. That is, the whole problem with the illegal use of bitcoin is in fact far-fetched. For various illegal purposes, coins with a higher degree of anonymity are used, such as Monero, ZCash and others. Bitcoin is only relatively anonymous.

And this problem was far-fetched and contrived right from the start. Satoshi himself never considered Bitcoin anonymous and untraceable as he uses the term “anonymous” only in reference to public keys in his WP. In fact, the Bitcoin blockchain, the so-called "public ledger", is a perfect tool for forensic analysis. First Bitcoin users like those unbanked from Silk Road and other similar DarkWeb markets may have been too optimistic in this regard and got caught in the end when their transactions had been properly analyzed and scrutinized. And I don't think other coins are totally safe either

As only time will tell if they are truly secure and anonymous in practice

I do even believe that those criminals are truly aware that bitcoin isn't really anonymous on the very first place no matter how they do trust up this coin on earlier days or years since they don't really have any choice which one to use on that time except fiat itself they do know the difference so they do make use of it which its really inevitable but the years goes by if we do really clearly look and investigate I don't know why people do really say about anonymity yet all transactions can be seen on public ledger.

I see your point, and it may well be the case

With that said though, I can't agree that they didn't have a choice, at least not in the sense you mean, and yes, I understand what you mean. While Bitcoin is not anonymous "out of the box", you can still heavily obfuscate its usage and massively impede tracing down transactions to their real sources. Although there were no Bitcoin mixers back then (as far as I know), you could still achieve pretty much the same effect manually. The bottom line is that if those Silk Road criminals knew what had been awaiting them, I think they would have avoided the consequences of their negligence in questions of safety and security, if not fully but still enough to get away mostly unscathed