Even neater, the feds can now convert your transaction trail used to sell drugs into a physical address.
[Note: You don't actually say that, rather, your attorney argues the above with reference to the rules of evidence and burden of proof; and asserts that receiving a box of drugs in the mail is insufficient proof by itself that you ordered it, and the only other evidence is that a series of jumbled characters paid for it.]
They're going to use it to get a warrant to search your house.
And yeah, this trawler like approach will not catch everybody. But it could score a lot of convictions very quickly.
When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef.
When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.
Definitely not. Transactions are public, but definitely not the information that connects transactions to identities or merchants.
> When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.
Also wrong. If you send the transaction from a web wallet, the merchant receiving the coins can hardly say anything about you.
It seems that there are lots of trolls here shouting something about bitcoin which they don't really know much about.
I am saying that a transaction is public, not the details.
I am also saying that dominos will have that transaction tied to the delivery address. This is not intrinsic to bitcoin, its all done on dominos side as part of delivering a pizza.
So let me try again: If abc transfers bitcoins to xyz, and the FBI knows that xyz is a drug dealer, then it sees that abc transfers bitcoins to DOM, then it can subpeona dominos records and find the address of someone who purchased drugs from xyz.
The assumptions I am making: the FBI knows that xyz is a drug dealer. the FBI knows that DOM is dominos.
Are the assumptions wrong? Would the FBI be able to know that?