Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
Apart from privacy coins like Monero, it’s all traceable
Good luck tracing coins that I bought for cash from John Shadyman who can’t give half a shit about KYC.
Spend some time looking into how the FBI traces wallets. It’s pretty easy, and it’s that at some point, John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you. The entire Privacy community considers cash better than every crypto other than Monero.
Also btw.
If I visit Shadyman twice and see that I’m getting coins from the same wallet, I’m gonna find another guy. That’s a pretty obvious thing to do.
Any pointers other than “go read some internet”? That’s a rather broad reference.
What “people tied to you”? I use the coins to pay some 1337Cr1m3L0rd, with neither of us ever catching a remote semblance of knowing who the other one is. Or, move them to Pierre LeCrook, who’s again giving out cash without asking questions. Shadyman and LeCrook are actually the closest links to me, but again good luck proving that I went to their house and received coins for cash or vice versa.
The pointers are that a lot of people track crypto wallets, it’s not hard to do, and that any wallet ever tied to an ID is directly identified. So any other wallet that touches those wallets gets pulled into a network cluster. Network analysis tools are decades old. Patterns get established. So your wallet isn’t any safer than Johnny Shadyshit and his wallet once they connect. You think Johnny won’t ever get rolled? You trust them to be invincible?
Just use Monero or cash.
https://thecoinomist.com/learn/crypto-osint-how-crypto-and-iowners-are-tracked/
https://www.acfcs.org/acfcs-contributor-report-bitcoin-tracking-for-law-enforcement
What you wrote right there is “Once a drug dealer is busted, it’s immediately known who ever bought drugs from them with cash”. Do you seriously not realize that it’s a loony thing to say?
Using monero or tumblers after buying the coins is of course a good advice in case the seller is a plant. But it doesn’t mean that his coins are somehow magically retroactively connected to me when he’s not a plant.
Not quite.
Look, ask any serious privacy community, they’ll give you the same answer. It’s kind of a known standard.
Well, you presumably believe that you know what you’re talking about, so why don’t you tell me how this tracing is supposed to work?
I create a fresh wallet A. I go to John and buy bitcoin with cash, deposited to that wallet. John knows zilch about me other than that some person occasionally shows up with cash, among dozens other people.
John gets busted, his wallets are known.
How does the FBI tie wallet A to me?
I really don’t think you understand how deep KYC goes, and how patterns get established based on wallets. This is not “loony” stuff- OSINT people do this in their spare time. Your wallet is tracked and known and connected to your dealer already by people. But hey, you do you. Just remember that you have been warned three times.
First off, read the Privacy Guides recommendations for crypto: Monero only as it provides privacy by default. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/
Second, have you done KYC anywhere else? That CAN get connected indirectly to your wallet. How do you GET cash to pay Johnny Shadyshit? Did you pull out enough to also match that cash in the amounts paid by Shadyshit to a wallet within the same general time frame? Feds have this records, and if they roll Johnny, that’s classic data they use to build a case. Did someone stupid that your dealer sells to have their girlfriend deposit money from Coinbase and send the exact same amount to their boyfriend who send the same amount to the dealer? They’re connected to you, too. People you’ve never MET are making nodes on the network mapping. https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/my-journey-without-kyc/36366
Edit: And hey, I get it. Back in the day, my guy told no one to bring cash by their place ever again because he knew local PD were likely sitting across the street. So he made everyone pay him with PayPal. Park a couple blocks away, pay with what was, at the time, " less traceable" because it wasn’t a break-in robbery risk for him, and cash on hand is also something cops will get you for.
My guy, you might as well keep going with what you’re doing. Fighting with anyone about it is straight up foolish in the face of everything I’ve showing you. But remember, you’re taking a risk to maybe/maybe not be yet another example of someone ignoring all the warnings.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/bitcoin-worth-35-million-tied-213110010.html https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-historic-336-billion-cryptocurrency-seizure-and-conviction https://www.crimeworld.com/ireland/how-30m-bitcoin-seizure-from-dublin-drug-dealer-could-lead-to-360m-jackpot-for-state/a/144477652.html https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-dealer-amassed-287k-in-crypto-selling-drugs-on-the-dark-web-meth-fentanyl-dealing-guns-weapons-handgun-rifle-ak-explosion-shot-crime-investigation-homeland-security-seattle-washington-money-thousands