Quote from: rebuilder on August 13, 2014, 07:40:22 AM

Quote from: oda.krell on August 12, 2014, 08:52:23 PM

Also, to stay with your "coin laundering" example, why would there need to be *more* wallets as time progresses (unless adoption by criminals also increases)?

Because the wallets used would be disposable, single-use. I'm assuming a launderer savvy and paranoid enough to use anonymizers of one kind or another to connect to the wallet provider. They'd want to avoid reusing wallets to lower the risk of correllation analysis blowing their operation. Each transaction would therefore involve creating at least two new wallets.

Now, an automated system for something like this would probably stand out other users, at least in sufficient volume. I don't know to what extent this is happening, but I do believe it is being done - it just makes sense. My point is, with activities requiring the constant creation of new wallets, you'd expect the number of wallets to keep rising even if the number of users did not increase. Rate of change may be a more interesting statistic to look at.

Yeah, didn't phrase that clear enough, but that was exactly my point: exponential growth in key metrics means increasing rate of change. 'Automatized wallet creation', the way I see it, would explain only a constant (positive) rate of change. The gap is (presumably) due to increase in usage.