270 Addresses Are Responsible for 55% of All Cryptocurrency Money Laundering (zdnet.com) 88
Criminals who keep their funds in cryptocurrency tend to launder funds through a small cluster of online services, blockchain investigations firm Chainalysis said in a report last week. From a report: This includes services like high-risk (low-reputation) crypto-exchange portals, online gambling platforms, cryptocurrency mixing services, and financial services that support cryptocurrency operations headquartered in high-risk jurisdictions. Criminal activity studied in this report included cryptocurrency addresses linked to online scams, ransomware attacks, terrorist funding, hacks, transactions linked to child abuse materials, and funds linked to payments made to dark web marketplaces offering illegal services like drugs, weapons, and stolen data. But while you'd expect that the money laundering resulting from such a broad spectrum of illegal activity to have taken place across a large number of services, Chainalysis reports that just a small group of 270 blockchain addresses have laundered around 55% of cryptocurrency associated with criminal activity.
So what (Score:2, Insightful)
Who cares:
5 Bank-corporations are responsible for 100 times that amount in drug and other organized crime money-laundering.
time for the owner of that bank to do some FPITA (Score:2)
time for the owner of that bank to do some FPITA time
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TFA makes no sense. The author is complaining that CC-mixing is so concentrated that "only" 270 mixers have 55% of the market.
If you had a choice of 270 grocery stores would you consider the market to be concentrated?
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You left out the most important term for the comparative analysis.
If there were 270 grocery stores on planet earth, that would be a surprising concentration.
You already leave our required terms, and you never learn when it is pointed out. You're a completely irredeemable idiot.
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If there were 270 grocery stores on planet earth, that would be a surprising concentration.
Perhaps if there were 270 individual shops. But if there were 270 grocery chains and each had a shop in every neighborhood, then every consumer would have plenty of choices. CC-Mixers are more like the latter because they are accessible to anyone worldwide.
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This story is not about the number of sites illegally laundering the proceeds of crime, this story is more subtle than that, this story is about https://www.chainalysis.com/ [chainalysis.com] and what they are doing to tack crypto transaction. Data map those virtual coins history, who had them when, where did they go when, why?!? Clearly they are contracting out their services to various agencies around the entire globe, the least worrisome for users taxation and most many three letter agencies and a lot with more letters.
T
Re: So what (Score:2)
But why dont they change the addresses since they are free to create?
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It probably has to do with reputation. How do you figure out whether Eve Cryptomixer is trustworthy or not, unless you can see that she has handled lots of transaction value in the past? Eve could change to a new address to thwart blockchain-based analysis, but how would you know to trust her new wallet address? How would you know it was not a forged claim by Eddie Cryptomixer, claiming to be Eve? If Eve cryptographically signs the declaration of a new address, that makes the change traceable.
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Half a dozen stock exchanges are responsible for the majority of the insider trading.
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Bane (Score:1, Troll)
The crime drawbacks of cryptocurrency appear to outweigh the benefits. Perhaps it's time to outlaw it. The defendants use the same logic as the NRA: it's a backup currency if gov't currency goes sour.
If authorities crack down on these few accounts, criminals will just spread out into accounts that look legitimate. It's not a show-stopper for them and thus not a solution.
Re:Bane (Score:5, Interesting)
The crime drawbacks of cryptocurrency appear to outweigh the benefits.
Perhaps we should go the other direction and legalize some of the activities generating so much cash for criminals.
15 states have legalized recreational marijuana and the sky didn't fall. We should extend legalization to the other 35 states. Then we should start legalizing other drugs as well.
The result will be a massive defunding of criminals. Then we can defund the PIC [wikipedia.org].
Prostitution is legal in most countries. They have fewer problems with sexual violence and disease. The money stays in the legal economy rather than funding organized crime.
Prostitution is legal in NV (Score:2)
Prostitution is legal in NV
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Prostitution is legal in NV
Not really. Prostitution is legal only inside a licensed brothel, and such licenses are very expensive. They are unavailable in Clark County, which contains Las Vegas.
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I "sort of" agree, with a bunch of caveats. E.g. I think it should be legal to sell, but not to advertise, a whole bunch of drugs. Trademarks should be required, but not allowed to be prominent. What should be prominent is a detailed "list of ingredients and quantity" in a legible type size and font. And patents should not be allowed. Any traditional medical uses should not be patentable. If you want to get a patent on something, you need to get it past the FDA *before* you start selling it.
Even so I
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I would say advertising would be strictly controlled. No need to advertise drugs to minors. But it would be health issues mostly from there on. It would definitely weaken cartels, which seems like a huge positive.
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Even so I will grant that this would lead to a bunch of problems.
Perhaps. But many people said the same about legalizing marijuana and they were wrong. It did not lead to more use of marijuana. The same people are using roughly the same amount. They are just purchasing it legally.
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I don't see a problem with advertising. The FDA should limit itself to regulation of production and truth in advertising. Basically, make sure the package contains what it is supposed to contain. This approach drifts drastically from the current system in which drug makers are granted immunity from liability... there would be no immunity putting all the responsibility for making sure things are safe and effective on those producing and selling. They lie, they pay up in civil suits, they lie on purpose and p
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I don't believe that addictive drugs should be allowed to be advertised. Period.
That said, there are degrees of addictiveness, and it varies a lot between people, so it's not a simple call. I consider marijuana non-addictive, but I've encountered people for whom it seemed to be addictive. I consider alcohol addictive, but no very for most people. And it has never really affected me that way. (Don't ask about my sister-in-law.)
So it's easiest if you just forbid advertising of drugs that haven't been app
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I don't believe anyone should be allowed the power to enforce any such restriction. Whether or not someone morally should advertise something addictive or not is a different issue but empowering anyone to make those calls is a disease which is worse than the cure.
Also... everything can be addictive including the advertising. Anything that makes you feel something (via direct chemical reaction or subjective emotion) produces a response in the brain which can form a habit.
"So it's easiest if you just forbid a
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"Tell that to all the addicts suffering from drug addiction. I am sure they feel empowered."
The only one who can empower a drug addict is the drug addict.
"So who should approve drugs?"
The person who uses them and the person who takes on the risk of selling them.
"And what are you talking about, they are definitely liable."
False. There is a reason the PDR lists dozens of side effects and so do the commercials for the drugs. Anything they disclose they are protected from liability against because they've follo
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This. Legalize drugs and sex. What a consenting adults or adults do with their bodies is NO ONE ELSE'S BUSINESS anyway (and should be handled as health issues vs criminal issues).
Everything else seems designed to hurt or steal from others. Weapons may just be defense, but everything else (online scams, ransomware attacks, terrorist funding, hacks, transactions linked to child abuse materials, stolen data) don't really seem to have legitimate positive uses.
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Sex is for the large part legal. Drugs, nearly so.
Sex trafficking of women is onerous, as is child involvement in porn.
Pot is pretty fun. Meth, however, can prevent a life well-lived.
The problem is of personal boundaries, and not letting a sex life interfere with work life, family relationships, and more. The same can also be said of drugs. We've all seen alcoholism, the ineffectiveness of temperance.
Then there's the list of legal drugs, like nicotine, alcohol, and other mild uppers/downers like coffee and
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Sex, mostly, but when it comes as a business, not in the US at least. Drugs really not so much; it's tightly controlled, and while progress is being made, it's slow.
Sex trafficking isn't consensual, nor is CP.
That's just one of those "will have to see" kind of things. I wonder how much people would choose meth if they had access to the other drugs. But even then, meth should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal one.
I'm not really buying it on the sex thing. While there are some people who might g
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Paid-for-sex comes in many forms. Prostitution is largely illegal, but a visit by a dom may not be. Both non-and-heteronormative sex by consenting adults over 18 is pretty much legal. It was not once so, even recently, and not universally.
For some, sex takes over their life by causing partner-control and abandonment issues, spouse abuse, and obsessive forms of sex. Happens a lot. This said, strippers, and much sex work is entirely legal across much of the planet. Penetrative sex is usually not. European cit
Re: Bane (Score:1)
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Didn't say desirable, rather, consensual is.
Re: Bane (Score:1)
One of the biggest uses for cryptocurrencies is to pay ransom for ransomware and data extortion attacks.
Two activities that not going to be on many peopleâ(TM)s legalization shortlist.
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People who kidnap people and demand a random usually ask for cash, often USD. There are several countries where kidnapping and demands for ransoms in cash are quite common.
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Did you miss the "for ransomware?"
Nothing to do with kidnapping at all.
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Well said. Shift right toward more personal freedom and not left toward more state control.
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I didn't say anything about political factions. Your statements relate to the compasses of the parties you mention not my compass.
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Perhaps we should go the other direction and legalize some of the activities generating so much cash for criminals.
Some things we're never going to legalize (nor should we), like sex trafficking. The line gets drawn somewhere and it becomes an enforcement, investigation, and prosecution effort that must be done. Broad legalization only gets you so far at stopping organized crime, eventually you have to get your hands dirty.
What about all the people (Score:2)
Check and Mate, libtardo.
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Yes, but marijuana is a bad example. They have not fully killed the illegal trade because they monetized the legalization too much.
What we really need to do is make all drugs fully legal without a prescription and force those that are normally abused to be made available at near zero profit with no crazy taxation. This would remove all incentive to push anyone new to try them. Without the push, the vast majority of drug users would never have started.
We should also decriminalize growing or making your own d
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Prostitution is legal in most countries. They have fewer problems with sexual violence and disease. The money stays in the legal economy rather than funding organized crime.
My country legalized prostitution ~20 years ago. A recent investigation found the sector is still mostly in the hands of organized crime, and many prostitutes are still illegal immigrants brought here under false pretenses who are doing this job against their will.
Re: Bane (Score:2)
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But that's only a relatively small portion of crime. Ransom, extortion, bribery, kid-napping, etc. would still be big problems.
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> The crime drawbacks of cryptocurrency appear to outweigh the benefits.
What benefits?
Disadvantages include:
* Requires heavy computer power, so much that entire "farms" or data centres are being constructed/bought just for crypto currency.
* Side effect of this: Availability of high end CPU and GPUs are affected, their prices rice.
* The creation of these data centers have an ecological impact, and their operation require a lot of power.
* Money flow are harder to trace. This helps money laundring and crimi
Hilarious (Score:3)
Slashdot keeps telling me cryptocurrency is worth less than tulip bulbs. This article is saying that isn't so?
Just don't put all your eggs in one basket (Score:2)
I'm happy for people who have done well with it.
I've done well with my investments and the very little bit of speculation / gambling that I do.
I just hope people don't put everything they have into Bitcoin.
Especially Bitcoin specifically, as opposed to crypto tokens.
Bitcoin specifically has the property that the supply is now increasing at a rate of about 0% and that can never increase. The stabilizing that the fed does by adjusting the money supply can't happen with Bitcoin. There is sound science that t
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"Bitcoin specifically has the property that the supply is now increasing at a rate of about 0% and that can never increase."
In response: [bitcoin.org]"New bitcoins are generated by a competitive and decentralized process called "mining". This process involves that individuals are rewarded by the network for their services. Bitcoin miners are processing transactions and securing the network using specialized hardware and are collecting new bitcoins in exchange."
"There is sound
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>> Bitcoin specifically has the property that the supply is now increasing at a rate of about 0% and that can never increase."
> In response: [bitcoin.org]"New bitcoins are generated by a competitive and decentralized process called "mining".
And at what rate are they being mined at this level?
The growth rate is now 0%, not 1%, not 2% but 0%.
The 21 million cap guarantees it'll soon be 0.0000000000%
> Although not in such widespread use today, gold
I don't know if you're aware, but when gold was used
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> intentional inflation caused by the US central reserve banks that causes your USD to be worth less today than it was 40 years ago. Some countries such as Nigeria have had their currency inflated so much it's become worthless. People fear the same could happen to the US due to how much we spend each year versus our GDP output.
High inflation is bad, agreed. Stupidly reckless spending certainly might lead to high inflation. The options to deal with the debt (eventually) are:
A. Pay it (do YOU have a spar
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> Utter nonsense. The growth rate of BTC is decreasing, but it's not 0. There will be about 328,125 more BTC added in the coming year
There are currently 18.5 million. What percentage of 18,500,000 is 328,000? 1% and falling. And nobody can stop it from falling.
The USD money supply is up 24% in the last year. That's an increase. Typical annual increase is about 6.5% just to keep up with economic growth. Now, do you want the BTC economy to be able to grow at more than 1% / year? Too bad, the money suppl
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By the way, you know you have a deflationary spiral when the value of the money keeps going up and up and up at a significant rate. A rate at which spending the money would be silly because if you hold on to it, it will be worth twice as much a year from now.
Would YOU spend your *Bucks today if you thought they'd be worth a lot more next month? Yeah, me neither.
You know what you call a currency that can't reasonably be used for buying things? You don't, because it's not a currency if it's not what people
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What percentage of 18,500,000 is 328,000? 1% and falling.
LOL, math much? It's 1.77%. Last I checked, that's not fucking 0% or 0.0000000000%, which is what you ridiculously claimed.
Damn, some people just have to double down on stupid comments.
And nobody can stop it from falling.
Boy, you just don't know when to quit saying stupid shit, do you?. The bitcoin codebase can be changed by consensus, just like it was in 2017. There are already factions in the community talking about changing the 21M limit.
I wonder what turd of a post you're gonna squeeze out next?
The USD money supply is up 24% in the last year. That's an increase. Typical annual increase is about 6.5% just to keep up with economic growth. Now, do you want the BTC economy to be able to grow at more than 1% / year? Too bad, the money supply is limited to 1%, so if usage increases by more than 1% you're guaranteed to have a deflationary spiral.
That's not even accounting for lost and destroyed coins, which actually reduce the supply.
Blah blah fucking blah. I'd love to
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There is sound science that this property *guarantees* a crash if it ever becomes a currency (if long-term prices such as rents and salaries are set in Bitcoin).
What science are you talking about here exactly?
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I've written about it in more detail before and I don't really feel like writing it up now, but if you check out / know the term "deflationary spiral" you'll have a sense of what I have in mind.
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If something doesn't appear like a sound investment, and no data or theory seems to support it as a rational decision. Then passing on it, no matter the outcome, is the right call. Being right without facts to back it up is just guessing. I'm not going to applaud people for guessing right when their knowledge is not transferable nor results reproducible.
People shouldn't make guesses or wild speculation with important money. And most of us only have a small amount of unimportant money that we can fritter awa
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- $5 tulips? LOL normal people ?
- $50 tulips? LOL normal people ?
- $500 tulips? LOL normal people ?
- $5,000 tulips? LOL normal people ?
- $50,000 tulips? LOL normal people ?
$0 tulips - Normal People - Told you
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What is an easy to acquire, untraceable* currency worth?
*Doesn't have to go through the current system.
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How many Tesla cars do you want to buy?
IIUC, there is going to be a bitcoin to Tesla conversion rate.
how about a stationwagon full of quarters? (Score:2)
If you're willing to do all your transactions in low-denomination coins, you can have untraceable currency that is very cheap. It's not very convenient unless you have a laundromat to launder the coins. (heh)
We still a ways off before serialized coins becomes wide spread enough to take the old money out of circulation. Even today, the paper currency with printed serial numbers is very difficult and time consuming to trace.
Nice thing (or bad thing) about BTC is that it is simple to trace every transaction in
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Well, FWIW, some people got very rich off the Tulip bulb episode. Of course a larger number ended up broke. If you invest in cryptocurrency, which do you expect to be? One of the small number who end up marvelously wealthy, or one of the vastly large number who lose almost their entire investment?
P.S.: I don't think it's exactly a gamble. I think it's a rigged market. It's not foolproof, so some of the insiders lose also, and an occasional outsider may win. (I'm not as sure about that.)
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How does that old saying go, you haven't lost money in stocks until you've sold them? If you bought in at the last bubble at $20k and held you'd be more than double that today.
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The amount of tulip bulbs that can be made to exist is boundless.
The amount of bitcoin that can be made to exist is 21M.
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The problem with Crypto (Score:2)
1. Money Laundering.
2. Drug purchases
3. Speculating on it's value.
Marijuana is gradually being legalized. Other drugs can't generate as much money because they're too strong, they tend to kill their users or at least make a mess out of them. Pot is huge because it's something regular folks can use. If you're smoking enough weed to get brain damage you'd be doing the same with booze and getting enough liver damage to look like a Simpson.
Now, sp
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The article is saying cryptocurrency has value for illegal activity. That's not a property to be proud of.
For normal use, BTC is useless.
- A single transaction costs $100 in energy.
- The entire network doesn't support more than 10 transactions/second.
- The massive fluctuations in value make every transaction a gamble. A currency needs stability to be useful.
Until those 3 are fixed, have fun playing with your tulip bulbs, but don't come crying when the whole thing comes crashing down again.
Tulip analogy [Re:Hilarious] (Score:2)
It seems "tulip bulbs" are being used as a fiat (de-facto) currency for crooks. Changes in bulb prices in either direction will only temporally hurt such usage. Thus, it doesn't matter much if bulb prices crash. The crashed price would be the new de-facto standard, rinse, repeat...
Stop those bastards at 192.168.1.1 (Score:2)
How can I block them ?
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Can't. Busy. Hunting down 127.0.0.1.
They say he's hiding at ::1.
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statistically not surprising (Score:2)
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You mean all KNOWN laundering. (Score:3)
Or are you telling me you know of ALL money laundering. Are you the kingpin of kingpins or what?
a totally meaningless statistic (Score:1)
Immutable Triple-Entry Accounting is Anti-FRAUD (Score:3, Informative)
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You chose to post this under an article that outlines the many and varied illegal activities that are paid for using BTC?
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Yes, I disagree with "people who have been shouting that BTC is only for criminals really don't know what they're talking about". In fact, the article disagrees with you, showing that $1.7B worth of money had been laundered via BTC. How does it feel that your actions are enabling and supporting criminal activity?
Thank you, Satoshi. (Score:1)