The crypto detectives are cleaning up | Hacker News Reader

The crypto detectives are cleaning up

nytimes.com

32 pointsfortran7720 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://archive.ph/9a3yE

http://web.archive.org/web/20230423045231/https://www.nytime...

I'm not sure why people misconstrue "public ledger" with privacy.

Still happy for the builders of analysis platforms. Although I suspect their paid services will be undercut.

>Although I suspect their paid services will be undercut.

I think you're referring to being undercut by open source tools, but their services are already useless when it comes to Monero. The IRS has had a $625k bounty on breaking it's privacy mechanism for a few years now, and it hasn't been claimed.

Wouldn't it make sense for large, privacy-conscious holders of Monero to outbid the IRS and offer a higher bounty for the same info? (Assuming they haven't already.)

They already have a great bug bounty program! In addition, they also regularly raise money from the community to pay security and crypto researchers to audit the protocols and codebase.

Recent and related:

The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543893 - April 2023 (230 comments)

Sad that an article about crypto detectives makes zero mention of Coffeezilla. That dude is the best detective/investigative journalist in the crypto space right now IMO

Sure he makes some nice videos but he isn't doing any of the real onchain detective work

> The same month, Chainalysis laid off about 40 employees, a roughly 5 percent cut.

They have 800 employees now?

I really thought after FTX people would start to wise up to these tulips.

Most people don't care about anonymity, the acceptance of visa, Mastercard, banking and mass surveillance shows this to be true.

Cryptos is just utter fantasy, like all other fiat, human constructs that do not exist.

Most people are grossly incompetent at existing, and a substantial portion of the grief they experience in life is self-inflicted. 60% of the population couldn't afford an emergency $500 expense and 50% of millennials earning six figures live paycheck to paycheck.

Whether most people even understand (let alone value) something as abstract as monetary autonomy (to say nothing of financial privacy, transaction irrepudiation, resistance to censorship, resistance to confiscation [for the competent], deflationary nature, the resilient distributed architecture, etc) is no indicator of the actual utility of said thing.

The things most people do care about (sports, "reality" TV, which carcinogenic cognition-degrading beverage to consume [and which one to fire live ammunition at], parasocial relationships with celebrities, astrology, and other such nonsense) should clear up any confusion about the value of public opinion.

To be clear: I'm not advocating for public adoption of crypto - quite the opposite - the public, writ large, is simultaneously too incompetent to perform key management, while also being too incompetent to manage counterparty risk. Centralized exchanges shouldn't even exist, but that's not an argument against the existence or utility of cryptocurrency itself, it's an argument against enabling idiots to harm themselves.

FIAT and Crypto are both products of the human imagination, true. The difference is that one exists within an ecosystem tailor-made for restricting freedom through surveillance, control, rampant inflation (USD has lost >97% of value since inception), and the other in an ecosystem that allows for absolute privacy, full control, and deflation, which incentivizes rather than punishes savers.

You might not care about any of those properties. The public might not even understand half of them. That doesn't mean those properties in a monetary system have no value to anyone.

The problem is that we are looking to these systems to solve human social problems. No matter what techno wizardry we put in place if we don't have core values that respect human life, including freedoms such as privacy then it will be for naught.

At the end of the day these systems will not protect you if the those with a monopoly on power see human existence as a zero sum game and are hell bent on being the winner that takes it all. We have understood this for millenia, there are countless doctrines that all share an understanding of these and have put in place common laws that aim to bring us together in peace.

The reason people aren’t outraged about these scams is because most players are playing with house money.

I say that as someone who has been “rugged” a few times. The pain isn’t all that much because it was all money made from crypto.

bTC offers pseudoanonymity ie “kinda anonymous”. A vpn equivalent service could work.

If you want to ever convert your money from BTC to a fiat currency, how so? Don't all the big exchanges require rigorous id verification? Sure you can store your BTC in a wallet making it pseudo anonymous in the sense that everyone can see your transaction flow but no one can link the wallet back to you. But then where and what can you actually use it for.

You can atomic swap BTC to XMR to obscure where the coins came from but you would have to then launder them to get fiat. I'm not sure how that's done, buying gift cards could be part of it. I think in many cases the coins are just funnelled to a jurisdiction that doesn't have KYC.

Chainalysis frequently hints that they have visibility into monero.

> Don't all the big exchanges require rigorous id verification

Depends on the exchange, locality and amount.

>Chainalysis says little publicly about the techniques it uses to combat technologies like Monero

Very disappointing. The entire world's population of cryptographers vs the power of an $8.6 billion company, who comes out on top?

One thing the government AFAIK has not done that might help is to provide guidelines or recommendations for how blockchain users should maintain privacy within legal parameters. Even better would be for them to provide a mixing service that includes whatever they would need to be okay with someone moving funds in a way that is untraceable to everyone except for government. We need to decouple the ideas of privacy from public view vs. complete anonymity to actually make progress on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com