UN China cracks down on ICOs - Hoard your Cryptoshekels!
- Thread starter Tranhuviya
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- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I hope they round up all the Bitcoin miners in China and shoot them. Fuck those cryptochinks.
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2017
Virtual currency that's regulated seems pointless to me. Isn't the entire idea to circumvent currency regulations and manipulation?
Maybe the future will be an endless parade of new virtual currencies created and then dumped once the awkward monolith of government gets around to regulating them.
Maybe the future will be an endless parade of new virtual currencies created and then dumped once the awkward monolith of government gets around to regulating them.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
It's already regulated in the United States and most civilized countries, to the same extent other commodities are.
The selling point of it somehow being pure anarchy is nonsense. If anything, dealing in large amounts of crypto already subjects you to increased scrutiny just because of that. It is also utterly dreadful at money laundering. Seriously, every single transaction ever is permanently recorded. It may not be open to casual scrutiny, but if you fuck around in amounts high enough to attract government scrutiny, forensics is going to nail you.
The way to launder money remains the same. Cash. Paper. Fiat currency is still the currency for crime.
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2013
You can trivially obscure crypto currency transactions to the same level of security that data encryption enjoys.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Not really. If you are connected to a transaction and have the private keys to the addresses involved, forensics can pretty easily prove you were the recipient/sender. If you have reasonable security, it could be difficult to connect you to those keys, but at some point, you're going to enter the password and decrypt your wallet and it will be in memory.
Also this is China. Maybe they can't decrypt it and prove it with a massive network of computers, but they can beat the holy fuck out of you until you admit to it.
I still imagine most Chinese miners and other users are just going to ignore this, but that may be difficult for the larger mining pools, who are often publicly known as users of crypto. If the authorities are really serious about this, they'll just raid them and seize their equipment.
- Joined
- Jun 8, 2015
I'll believe cryptocurrency is legit when someone other than bitcoin miners, speculators and fiat hating government conspiracists have something good to say about it.
It is, was, and remains a super shady grey area where you are more likely than not to lose and have no recorse.
It is, was, and remains a super shady grey area where you are more likely than not to lose and have no recorse.
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2016
Don't talk shit about the bit reeeeeeee
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2013
Addresses are disposable. Standard bitcoin practice involves generating fresh addresses for each transaction.
If you have money you want to get from one address to another address, without leaving a provable connection between the two, you can do that with bitcoin. The theoretical information security for cash compared to bitcoin is equivalent. You use the same techniques to launder money in both cases, send the transactions through legitimate or unknown transactions repeatedly until the provable connection is watered down to the point where nothing can be established.
Like, it's like laundering money through pizza delivery guys' tips. You can't prove someone gave too big of a tip, and no one's going to notice if he doesn't take 100% of his tips home.
Bitcoin lets you build scams like that, except you can automate it. You can do the equivalent of 500 pizza places virtually with bitcoin, trivially.
This is standard practice when doing significant illegal business with bitcoin. They're called bitcoin tumblers. Dirty bitcoins go in, clean bitcoins come out.
There's no security reason why you'd go with cash over bitcoins. When executed perfectly, cash is only equivalent to bitcoin.
The downside to bitcoin are transaction fees*. I would say that bitcoin is probably worth it when moving large amounts of dirty money across a large distance. Like the cost of moving it from New York to Los Angeles is probably much cheaper and less risky with bitcoin than with traditional techniques.
But if you're just doing local business, it's probably best to just quit being a neckbeard and make some sketchy friends who can handle that kind of business for you.
Edit: Well, and other downsides like reliably buying/selling bitcoin and the fluctuating value. Actually, the fluctuating value is probably a lot more than transaction fees. But yeah, security isn't the issue, cost is.
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- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Currently, most wallets are generated from a 10-12 word phrase that is kept as a backup. Most people write this down in at least one place. It's standard practice not to reuse the same address more than once, but if you have the phrase, you can generate the entire wallet, and if you have the phrase, you're almost certainly the person connected to any transaction deterministically generated from that phrase.
It's best practice to sweep wallets and chuck them every now and again, but people don't always do that in a timely fashion.
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2013
The transactions would be clean by the time they got to the wallet.
A comparison with cash would be like having a briefcase full of cash covered in cocaine. They'll still take your money.
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2016
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
That guy fucked up. Also he had to click past at least two confirmations and enter a password even to send that. Maybe he should have actually looked at what he was doing first.