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Comment by kova12 | Hacker News Reader

What exactly does it mean "fraudulent transaction" in the context of bitcoin? It's not like you can use someone else's account number to purchase stuff.

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The people who buy the game then resell the key on other websites for less than you find it on steam. They can buy many licenses when the game is on sale, so even if there is no chargeback, the devs can lose money through these methods. Otherwise it is still a money laundering tactic.

Here’s a blog post where they talk about this eco system.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303

I'm failing to understand why is this considered fraudulent. Buy low sell high, this is how all trade works. People buying multiple keys for resale is just an unintended consequence of underpricing the product.

If the purpose is to avoid KYC laws and turn bitcoin to cash, it isn’t hard to understand why Steam wants to avoid these types of customers.

Also, they aren’t buying low and selling high, they are buying low and selling even lower because they are okay with a lossy conversion.

OK that kind of makes sense: "fraud" = making geographical or time-limited price discrimination less effective

i suspect that steam was using a payment processor which identified that the coins were on a blacklist of sorts, and was not legitimately acquired (e.g., either stolen, or purchased with stolen money etc).

How does Walmart compare to that regarding purchases with ill-gotten cash?

Cash is completely fungible because there is no clear trace of money from one person to the next.

If someone steals 100k of cash, there is a very low probability that the serial number of those bills were recorded somewhere. And even if they were, you couldn't easily trace the money though complex systems.

Bitcoin on the other hand is a complete and open ledger. When these large heists that constantly happen, it is trivial to identify the transactions that happen afterwards.

Cash is actually anonymous and Bitcoin is only pseudo-anonymous.

Which iirc was the basis for "cleanly mined" btc with little to no transaction history on-chain and tumbler/mixer services that attempted to obfuscate it.

The fact that it’s difficult or expensive to track does not mean it cannot be. Technically it’s possible to force every cash handling business to scan (just like you scan an UPC) each bill.

"This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."

If I buy you lunch today, you can pay me back next week. We're not "cash handling business[es]", so we wouldn't have to scan.

Second, I don't think it's technically possible. For companies that do business across state lines, sure, but within a state's border, interstate commerce laws don't apply. Each state would have to enact a similar law. And best of luck with that.

Walmart (like all large retailers) spends a ton of effort trying to address e.g. laundering efforts with gift cards, actually. Google around for all the press releases about how they partner with the FBI, etc... They absolutely recognize that they're part of the laundering chain (and that this makes them liable to punishments under AML statutes, of course).

Walmart (like all large retailers) spends a ton of effort trying to address e.g. laundering efforts with gift cards, actually

For example, you can't buy a gift card in an Apple Store without signing a statement promising that you're not buying the gift card because a stranger online told you to.

Sounds ineffective on the surface, especially to jaded tech-types, but it's enough to give real people in the process of being scammed an opportunity to think about what they're doing.

If cash could tell you whether it was illegally acquired then I'm sure many businesses would refuse to accept illegal cash.

Thankfully there is no distributed ledger keeping track of every little thing so we don’t have to worry about that.

Because cash can't be easily identified as stolen, so the problem does not exist.

Just like the electricity cost of bank transaction cannot be easily quantified, so the problem does not exist.

Those problems only exist in Bitcoin. /s

No one says that the electricity cost of a bank transaction can't be quantified. They say it's far cheaper than bitcoin.

Because it is.

Bitcoin by its very nature wants to expand to consume every possible unit of energy it can.

Money laundering I'd imagine.

Criminal creates shit game, buys game using crypto and gets paid out in fiat because *very* few developers would accept being paid in crypto.

This does precisely nothing to “clean” the money as it doesn’t eliminate the direct link between you and the dirty bitcoins.

Forgive my ignorance, but does, for example, ransomware payments in, for example, bitcoin make the bitcoin "dirty"?

The only context I have heard "dirty" coins in is if they have been stolen from a crypto platform, or I think stolen by a influential crypto bro.

> Forgive my ignorance, but does, for example, ransomware payments in, for example, bitcoin make the bitcoin "dirty"?

Yep, also links to darknet markets and any other “bad actors” whose addresses are known.

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