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Comment by gpcr1949 | Hacker News Reader

gpcr1949

Interestingly, my location has some monero ATMs that take cash, and the 10% or so fee (and apparently - various vulnerabilities) seems well worth it for what is by all measures a quite low effort hands-off way to get money that is quite anonymous, at least for most low key purposes, such as small recreational drug orders etc.

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Aren't Monero transactions completely obscured anyways?

It doesn't make a difference if you using a Bitcoin ATM or transfer to your Kraken account (except a 10% fee for the former).

My understanding, and this may be wrong since I don’t actually have Monero, is it’s not since US customers are subject to KYC. While the transaction on the blockchain would be obfuscated, the Exchange as the sender/receiver would still have the withdraw and deposit addresses since they were one of the parties of the transaction.

Further transactions after withdrawing would be difficult to discern, but an exchange could be used to track an approximation of how much Monero you own.

A cash based ATM purchase would be more difficult to track since no KYC is involved.

It doesn't matter if Monero is used with KYC - transactions are obfuscated.

That means the transactions can't be traced to your KYC wallet on Kraken, meaning you're spending 10% on an ATM for no reason.

Monero itself is not KYC, sorry if I worded that poorly above.

The transactions to and from Kraken can definitely be tracked since they would have a record of the actual wallet address you sent your funds to. As for things that happen after that money hits your wallet - you’re right they wouldn’t be able to track it.

I checked the Monero subreddit just to see if my understanding of it tracked with what people who actually own it say and it looks like they agree that transferring from a KYC exchange does allow tracking for transactions coming out or into the exchange.

https://reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/ppcusq/moving_funds_bet...

I didn't say Monero is KYC.

I also didn't say you transfer directly into Kraken. Instead, you would use at least 1 or 2 other wallets before transferring into Kraken, because that bypasses their scanning.

Kraken is still cheaper while doing that than paying a 10% fee for an ATM.

have not used kraken, but the convenience i am talking about is that someone who has never used any cryptocurrency and does not hold any, can simply walk in there with cash and have monero a minute later, ready to use. but it is true that for many people that convenience is not worth a whole 10%, especially if they somewhat know what they are doing.

IIRC, bitcoin ATMs do not set up wallets for you.

You still need to create a wallet, key, etc. and that is not easy to do for beginners without an exchange like Kraken. Most DNMs use temporary addresses so it's not a good idea to try to transfer directly from a bitcon ATM to a DNM.

If you pay somebody anonymously, how do they know that the payment they've received is yours and not somebody else's? This is something I've always wondered about anonymous payments. I don't see how they can work in practice.

Several ways to do this, but a simple one: You can generate a unique address where you would know where the payment possibly came from, but nobody looking on-chain could deduce the sender.

To add to the previous response, for your wallet you can create multiple sub-accounts or sub-addresses, that can be used to specifically track payments. You can also use integrated addresses, which tags an encrypted payment id to go with it.

Additionally the sender can prove they sent a specific transaction output to you, without exposing information where it came from.

Do these ATMs not have cameras? If they do, do you wear a mask while operating the ATM?

Good news. Thanks to COVID wearing a mask is no longer weird.

They might have cameras, in any case they are in malls so you will be on those cams anyway. Though as someone downthread remarked, thanks to covid it's no problem to be masked.

You might be missing the point. It's not about being a random person at the mall getting caught by the camera. It is about the single individual at the exact time making a transaction from an "anonymous" crypto account that is the point.

Which country is this? I would have thought all western countries would have KYC for these things.

This is in Prague, Czech Republic.

edit: and re:KYC, there is a money limit above which you need to provide KYC/registration. This limit is 24000 CZK = 1096 USD

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