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Comment by jashmenn | Hacker News Reader

I've been following these sort of cases and I haven't found one article that actually publishes the alleged transaction hashes of the event.

For better or for worse, there would be tons of vigilantes who would be happy to track down the current location of these funds.

That is, until the robbers figure out they can require the hostage to convert into Monero first.

Has anyone done a serious audit on Monero? I have a feeling people are overconfident about it's anonymity.

Picture Tor. Now picture your browsing history is stored forever so if there's ever a bug in the protocol, it all goes clear...

That's basically the current state of things with Tor, under the what I think is very real assumption that all traffic is stored.

> That's basically the current state of things with Tor, under the what I think is very real assumption that all traffic is stored.

I mean, systems like Tempora[1] and the NSA's Utah data center[2] are known. Tempora apparently stores data for 3 days and metadata for 30 days.

I'd concede they may store metadata, but I seriously doubt they're storing the full traffic. That doesn't seem doable from a logistical standpoint.

> That doesn't seem doable from a logistical standpoint.

Surely you're not going to cite budgetary constraint.

> For better or for worse, there would be tons of vigilantes who would be happy to track down the current location of these funds.

But for what good? Couldn't the criminals just as easily create a throwaway wallet?

> That is, until the robbers figure out they can require the hostage to convert into Monero first.

Can't the criminals convert it to monero themselves after it's transferred to the throwaway wallet? Why does the hostage have to be the one to do it?

So they're on the hook with the IRS.