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Comment by stathibus | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time understanding how anyone can claim they know the true percentage of crypto transactions that are used for illegal activity. At best they can report the subset that they were able to track down, and it seems reasonable to believe that most large value illegal transactions are carried out by people who know how to hide it.

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There have been tracing applications around for years now in this space. They've identified wallets & send micro transactions around to many to distinguish who is who in terms of dark markets, services, bad actors etc. Given the many hacks with wallets and also services selling that data believe me they know more than you are giving them credit.

In terms of the bad actions.. Those who are trying to hide money have known this for years so they are in different currencies that provide better privacy.

I didn't make any claims about how much they know.

They use various clustering algorithms and heuristics, but it's true that it only gives a lower bound at best.

For example: https://youtu.be/D_Eqz8_Jm2E

They don't know the true percentage, and what we do know per the findings shared by Coinbase [0] is that the amount of fraud is not meaningful. It's the same situation with other forms of currency. I really think the claims about fraud are intentionally overblown because bad actors just want to subsume crypto's momentum.

[0] - https://blog.coinbase.com/fact-check-crypto-is-increasingly-...

This is not just about fraud. And I could wave the same stick at you - "I really think claims about illegal activity are intentionally swept under the rug by crypto shills." See how easy that is...

Except the data does not support your stick. Whereas it does support mine.

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