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Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have

Bitcoin's public ledger is especially vulnerable to FBI "follow the money" investigation. Only one end is required to be known, and the entire trail is easily followed.

The federal agent who stole a portion of Dread Pirate Roberts' Bitcoin was quickly tracked and prosecuted.

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Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless.

The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient.

Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.

Just like giant corporate balance sheets?

Sounds like something where if you offered that as a service you would probably be legally required to Know Your Customer and to keep records...

These services does not require manipulating real money. To run the service, it requires a device connected to the internet, that all. You can find a lot of way to host it in a country that don't have these requirements, or to host it anonymously.

Mixers are now a target for law enforcement though, just so you know.

I know, but you can easily do a service on a decentralized service really hard to shutdown, anonymously.

Honestly, it seems like you’re trying to make it sound like a device one would use exclusively for scamming.

The poster was replying to a comment discussing traceability by the FBI so he can hardly be blamed for the topic.

Not exclusively - it is also used for extortion, laundering money, and paying for illegal goods and services.

Until you want to make it into useful things and then the IRS will be asking how you bought that car and where the money came from. If it came from a laundering pool of bitcoins, tough luck convincing anyone you didn't do money laundering.

Tracking crypto-coins are actually real business [0].

[0]: https://www.chainalysis.com

And a growing field of business, I would bet.

Exchanging Bitcoin for Monero or Zcash, making a private transaction, then selling it back for Bitcoin under a separate account would seemingly stop this dead in its tracks.

But then untraceability would be a quality or Monero or Zcash, not Bitcoin itself.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Bitcoin is obviously traceable by design, but I've seen claims this traceability is unbreakable, even by mixers or roundtrips to other currencies, which just sounds like FUD and nonsense to me.

wasabi wallet's[1] coinjoin today has a large enough pool to make your bitcoin txs fungible.

[1] https://wasabiwallet.io

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