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Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

I would be very curious to know why he thought he would get away with this. Did he erroneously believe Bitcoin is anonymous? Have there been any interviews with the agent or those around him?

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Call me cynical, but I don't believe it's uncommon for them to take forfeit money after an arrest. This time the only difference was that Bitcoin transactions could be publicly seen, as opposed to cash/wire transfer, and the agent wasn't aware of that.

That normally wouldn't go directly to the agent though, right? So that's completely different.

I believe he was saying it's not uncommon for law enforcement officers to steal forfeitures from the state.

If you're the one accounting for an arrested individual's belongings, it's very easy to falsify documents.

> the agent wasn't aware of that

If thats the case, it's interesting that he wasn't aware of the fundamentals of the technology that enabled the people he was investigating.

Is it? Criminals are often just dumb.

Well, you'd expect that the agents investigating those crimes would not be.

I'd expect agents to be organized and well versed in the goals and procedures of departments, not smarter or better at any random thing than any other human.

Why is that?

Because they are expected to have the skills needed to perform their job, specially such an important one.

I personally know few quite technical people who even own some Bitcoins and tried to confront me in recent discussion when I stated that all BTC transactions can be publicly seen. They knew that BTC doesn't provide complete anonymity, but thought of it more like wire transfer, where you can only see transactions from some "authorized center", exchange or something, not that anyone can see them. So I guess this detail is easy to miss or misinterpret.

Bitcoin provides strong anonymity as long as you never tell anyone that wallet dcfb49fb16e688a46841c05b07b1ee40 is yours and never withdraw any money. "X is true if both Y and Z" is a UX problem waiting to happen. It's too subtle for people who check their smartphones every seven minutes, Y and/or Z will be lost in hearsay transmission.

Pseudoanonymity. There’s an important difference.

Pseudonymity, actually.

If you digress into talking about important distinctions using weird long words, people are especially likely to forget the Y&Z conditions.

Did you mean pseudoanonymity or pseudonymity, BTW? I can see the case for either/both, but the MSB is that is something hinges on distinctions as subtle as that, then it's too complex for 2017's general audience. UX accident waiting to happen.

It’s not a nitpicking point. Bitcoin doesn’t provide any anonymity at all. It explicitly breaks anonymity and great lengths have to be taken to recover it. Pseudonymity is a fundamentally different property.

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