US Law Enforcement Traces Bitcoin Transfers to Nab ‘Largest’ Child Porn Site

I don't really get it, but you have a "money out" problem like any fraud.

Even if you buy bitcoin in untraceable in cash, you transfer it to wallets, you have two eventual issues. You'll either buy something and ship it to yourself, or you'll need to get real cash out. The former leaves a vendor ready to give you up, and the latter only works with exchanges that have your ID.

Am I missing something?

But if you're accepting payment and then cashing out, you will need a safe way to cash out and localbitcoins will get you caught fast. Agents would see the money going to a localbitcoins user. They could either setup a sting or just contact whomever has been buying these coins off of you.

I wish I was better.

There are also likely a lot of people who get out before they are caught, after making a modest amount of money.

"Some men just want to see the world burn."

yet. If this becomes a problem, it will be fully automated. Why wouldn't it be? You're literally leaving a trail of every unlawful payment you've ever made and waving it around in front of police. You don't think they'll pay someone to automate de-anonymiziation and automatic suspicious transaction flagging?

At least with Visa they need a warrant.

If you can narrow a suspect pool from millions down to hundreds by showing they were at the same 'location' as the perpetrator, that's not great but it's surely a start.

What percentage of people using tumblers aren't up to something sketchy? Even if that's 95% that's still greatly amplifying the signal when you're talking about looking for one individual among a hundred thousand.

This isn't actually a feature of most legal systems, so depends where they're located.

https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/

If you want to go to the BTM route, they convert to monero, and use the "monerujo wallet" to auto-convert to bitcoin at the BTM. The only downfall is the btm asks for ID after $2000 or so. So I assume it's taxed in some way. The margins on drugs is high enough where the extra fee they have to pay is negligable

> What I really want to know is how are the larger ransomware operators converting it to fiat

Nothing is off limits for them. They can buy credit cards and bank account credentials, exchange coins to it and withdraw cash through ATMs, or buy something with that money and sell it cheaper for cash.

Practically speaking, though, users of privacy coins are usually looking for plausible deniability rather than total untraceability. The legal standard for criminal cases is "beyond a reasonable doubt"; if there's even a 50% chance that you're just an innocent person caught up by circumstances, you'll have trouble convincing a jury of guilt.

Let's leave the conspiracy theories to the pro-Bitcoin folks, it's kind of their speciality.

And showing up at an ATM with a mask will definitely attract some attention. I wouldn't be surprised if they further improve their system and requires facial detection (not necessarily recognition) as well.

It takes $X million to collect evidence, hire a prosecutor, take time up in court AND they still have to balance the budget by going after different kinds of criminals so the agency looks like it's doing something to the general public.

So no, it's not a stupid conspiracy. Pay your taxes and vote for representatives that will increase funding!

it all just comes down to that the walls of anonymity are coming down and the privacy we are so afraid will be taken away by some corporation was long lost to the government who valued it even less

But it may be moot if the exchanges simply mark any bitcoin that has gone through a tumbler as tainted and refuse to convert it into anything else.

I did find a chart where it is the 4th most accepted after BTC, LTC, and ETH.

I imagine those other coins are more accepted because they have larger network effects. I also imagine that Monero's network will grow even more as it becomes more developed.

Then I realized that nothing about moving humans online made humans magically more virtuous than they are in meatspace, and the tools we've used to audit and intercept bad-behaving humans in the real world have merit online too.

There's a reason so much motion online in the past two decades has been in the direction of "de-wild-Westing" it.

The major problem is when someone want to earn money by becoming a distributor that sits between producer and consumer, like the one in the article, and those people usually do consider the risk of getting caught. There is however a silver lining in that those are quite few and tend to become major target for law enforcement and sooner or later the opsec will have a flaw. It is questionable if Internet can ever become so safe that a person can be one of a handful few that earn millions for years without giving out any clues to whom they are.

So to me this resolve conundrum. Neither criminal is likely to operate unimpeded even when the Internet become safer from censorship and mass-surveillance.

No.

Neoteny in humans apply to both males and females and apply not only to physical appearance, but also behavior. You can compare with other primates – Chimps can be very friendly until they reach adulthood, when they become less social and more aggressive.

The secondary characteristics develop at puberty on both sexes, they are just different.

In fact, there is a reason why they develop past a certain age. The individuals we are discussing here are not going to be selected for this trait, as they would not be able to reproduce.

> Ethical question: If no children were harmed and 100% of the videos and images produced were synthetic, would simply consumption of the media still be a problem?

No. Because the reason people are prosecuted is that, at some point, someone has been harmed. There are some very disturbing (to my senses) cartoons out there. No-one is jailed for drawing or viewing cartoons in any democratic society.

It seems to me that this hypothesis is unlikely. Is there any evidence that: 1) Sexual preference is genetic? (It seems intuitive that women whose bodies exhibit extremely visual traits of reproduction would be selected for. However, I don't the connection between that and there being equivalent selective pressure on men to be attracted to that). i.e. where is the gene that makes men attracted to young women specifically, and how and why is that under selective pressure?

2) Is there any evidence that pedophilia isn't a mental disorder caused by something else? Hormone imbalance? Developmental deficiency?

However, your theory does explain why so many more men than women are pedophiles, although it seems entirely inadequate at explaining the few number of women pedophiles that do exist.

Either way, it's a curious and interesting point. Thank you for making it.

In my opinion it's far more

It's often assumed that only females have a "biological clock." Maybe that's not true. Maybe males start to crave offspring too, and some mistake these feelings for sexual attraction.

Then its not a problem.

You’re suggesting someone is born a pedophile?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

She was 6.

Leaving such corrupted/psychopathic people out in public is hopelessly dangerous. ANYONE who has violated a child's life in this way doesn't deserve a second chance. They have spoilt several lives already till now.

If this thing were a big enough problem, the government could easily require you to provide a ledger of all the parties you've transacted with (Your wallet is doing book-keeping, how hard would it be for a legitimate user to enter a small memo for every transaction, anyways?)

Failure to provide a ledger, or for your ledger to fail to cross-correlate with that of your counterparty would, of course, imply that you're a criminal.

Unlike cash, bitcoin leaves a very obvious breadcrumb trail, that can, with a bit of legislature, be turned into an incredibly useful tool for LE.

there was a submission here a bit ago regarding canadian banking systems wanting to go no cash, and mandate electronic purchase and payment.

we have seen economic collapse and what it looks like. if physical banknotes are not available, we use cigarettes, vodka, and tampons.

I think those things are fairly untraceable

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Bitcoin transactions turned out to be a great deal less private than that, because separate transactions from the same wallet can be linked via the change outputs (unlike separate trades on a ticker tape).

Anonymity and protection from the Big Bad Government were definitely talking points used by many cryptocurrency enthusiasts. "It can't be banned and can't be seized", rings a bell? Except of course if the Big Bad Government comes knocking at your door and tells you to hand your wallet over "or else".

Bitcoin is more anonymous than a bank transaction. If I buy something with a credit card, they have my credit card number that is easily linked to me. With Bitcoin it is less easy. Unfortunately with Bitcoin once you have been 'revealed' then your transaction 'graph' is then revealed in the public, whereas the credit card doesn't have that problem.

It depends who you want to be anonymous from. Governments can easily get bank transactions, and also they can investigate bitcoin-based crime and then just trace the public ledger.

Businesses will not easily get bank transactions or map general bitcoin addresses to people, but if you use a credit card you tend to have to give them a lot of other matching information such as your name and address, whereas with bitcoin you don't need to give them anything. Assuming there is no delivery involved it can be pretty anonymous. But again if they did happen to pattern match (maybe they have another customer who you have dealt with too) they could join some dots.

But to be safe it's best to assume Bitcoin is not anonymous and that anyone can find out eventually where you have spent your money.

I never trusted the mixers personally. But it was a hot debate item a few years back whether or not law enforcement could track transactions through a mixer.

Its always been my firm belief that a mixer was just automated money laundering and probably puts you up for legal scrutiny as well. But we'll see how the FBI decides to handle those...

Gotta say though, this is one of the few times I'm glad to see someone too stupid to use proper anonymization tools.