Since the original 2008 white paper introducing blockchain technology, bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions have been touted as completely anonymous and private. But how anonymous are crypto transactions really?
Earlier this year, $3.6 billion in bitcoin was seized from a Manhattan couple who were arrested and charged with money laundering in connection with a 2016 hack on the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. It was the largest financial seizure in the Justice Department’s history.
Law enforcement went to great lengths to trace the illicit funds, including tracking the stolen bitcoin through a complicated web of transactions spanning multiple countries. It took six years, but authorities eventually caught up. More recently, researchers have demonstrated traceability via unintentional patterns in bitcoin’s transactional data – the bigger a data set gets, the more patterns show up. And patterns can be identified and tracked.
Read more at: https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/are-cryptocurrency-transactions-actually-anonymous/
Use Monero (XMR) for privacy. You can obtain anonymity in Bitcoin, but its hard to maintain. Most people can’t do it reliably. If you send Bit on to or from a kyc wallet, it’s all over. The taproot soft fork holds opportunity for privacy on Bitcoin, but I think it has a way to go until available.
The KYC is concerning. For instance, Binance started requiring not just IDs but proof of income documents. While from a financial standpoint, this is understandable to a degree, privacy-wise, it tells a grim and scary picture not only because it has implications at the personal level but because it is contradictory to the initial intention of cryptocurrencies in general, which is the decentralization of “cash” or payments.
Bitcoin is anonymous in the part that the public addresses are not directly identifiable. But all transactions are identifiable and the most “buy” and “sell” are from tracking websites.
Not something like monero. That is in many cases better and more anonymous.
