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Comment by babaganoosh89 | Hacker News Reader

Anonymizing BTC via BTC -> XMR -> BTC seems hard these days.

The cool kids now launder their coins through mining rig rentals. Spend old coins, get new ones back.

That's interesting, rig renting has been available for a while now but I never connected the dots and just assumed it just made sense for some people.

Don't forget to buy carbon offsets

Can you buy those in BTC anywhere?

There's nothing stopping courts from demanding that XMR.to keep records of the chain of custody when users buy XMR via BTC on their service.

Almost all exchanges adhere to KYC laws, so there's a good chance that following transactions backwards will lead to an identifiable buyer or seller of Bitcoin.

What technical features of Monero make it a solution for actual anonymization of BTC?

Theoretically the conversion back to btc can’t be connected to the original btc->xmr conversion

(Edit: btc to xml would be a novel transaction. Curse you autocorrect)

bisq is the most anonymous way that i know of

Good luck spending the tainted BTC you buy on Bisq.

I doubt that the one valid use case for Bitcoin, purchasing things on the grey/black market, is impacted by tainted BTC.

So they actually have measures to stop tumbled coins from re-entering the supply?

tainted BTC doesn't exist.

It absolutely does, there are plenty of BTC addresses that are tainted and not accepted by exchanges.

How does it work if you just send the entire “tainted” coin to a new address and then send that to the exchange? Sounds like smoke and mirrors to me

Very simply. They don’t allow coins with that lineage. There are so many people ignorant of the reality of bitcoins fungibility problem it amazes me.

If sent such tainted bitcoins, do the exchanges send them back, or seize them?

Coinbase won't let you sell tainted coins but will let you withdraw them. No exchange will seize them.

> ignorant of the reality of bitcoins fungibility

This is not an issue with bitcoin, but of exchanges. That's why I specifically asked if exchanges cared if taintedness was transitive.

I have to be blunt but this is a very basic property of the blockchain, which by design keeps an entire history of every single transaction (source and destination address) that is ever made.

This type of lack of understanding is rife. Makes me quite bullish on Monero when people realise how little privacy Bitcoin and crappy forks provide. Might see a signal type movement to Monero.

I don't think that irrational retail investors understand, or care to understand, Bitcoin or Monero implementation details. Bitcoin's valuation has little to do with its technical merits. It's all just internet money to most people.

Yea I agree right now.

But even showing a few newbie friends how I could see their balance and transactions after they sent me BTC or shared their address with me, baffled them, they couldn’t believe it.

People will start to care as they become extorted, or embarrassed. Privacy is a fundamental requirement of good money.

I think people will learn this over time and gravitate towards a better money for the internet.

What’s your Bitcoin address? I’ll send you some.

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