Article: Bitcoin Transactions Analysis Breaks Tor Anonymity

https://btcmanager.com/bitcoin-transactions-analysis-breaks-tor-anonymity/

Relevant parts:

"It is quite ironic how Bitcoin had been stigmatized in the past as an anonymous payment method that enables criminal activity and money laundering. In fact, we now understand that the opposite is true. Bitcoin is practically a gift for law enforcement agencies with access to big data. Not only can bitcoin transactions be analyzed to expose criminal activity currently taking place over Tor, but transactions made in the past can also be analyzed to reveal, in accurate detail, who did what, and when, from where. If no statute of limitations is in place for the specific illegal activity, then bitcoin can be a tool that law enforcement agencies can use to track down every prosecutable felony and misdemeanor accomplished with bitcoin over Tor since the creation of the network."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.07501.pdf


Comments


[4 Points] Hotrod_Greaser:

Bullshit.


[4 Points] throwahooawayyfoe:

I find it somewhat funny how they suddenly went from "waaaah we don't know how to track this so it must be a bad thing" to "hahahaha we love this crap and just made a shitload of money from hodling that last batch of coins we stole from y'all, you guiez are so fucked"


[3 Points] levelup96:

Fuck em.


[2 Points] OptionalAccountant:

COME AT ME BRO


[2 Points] ostespiseren:

Did you read this? This was posts on social media that tied the addresses to Tor services. Your "relevant parts" is completely missing the point and is in no way relevant.

They then crawled two online social networks; Twitter and the Bitcointalk.org forum. Five billion tweets and one million bitcointalk forum pages were crawled to create two datasets of 4,100, and 41,000 bitcoin addresses publicly displayed on these respective social networks. Finally, they examined Bitcoin blockchain transaction data, specifically searching for transactions between Twitter/Bitcointalk users BTC addresses and Tor hidden services BTC addresses. The results were expanded with techniques that built upon the initial findings and analyzed corresponding transaction history.


[1 Points] STFUMandy:

What a bad apple Bitcoin turned out to be :(


[1 Points] ThePrinceOfFrance:

Doesn't mention tumblers. We might be safe. But we are probably fucked


[1 Points] pymmit:

This has be doable for years.

I remember discussing with AK my abilities to do this in late 2016.


[0 Points] Burn_all_gays:

bitcoin was created by the CIA/Mossad as a way to track drug dealers