Silk Road forums

Discussion => Security => Topic started by: dmc002 on August 29, 2013, 12:43 am

Title: Bitcoin Anonymity
Post by: dmc002 on August 29, 2013, 12:43 am
Found this online. Some people seem to not care about anonymity. If you value your privacy please do not deposit your bitcoins directly in to Silk Road. That's just bad practice.

Quote
Average bitcoin users appear to be unaware at how quickly their bitcoin spending could be linked back to them. The Silk Road, an online marketplace of mostly illicit goods, only accepts bitcoin.

"We saw a lot of people deposit into Silk Road directly from their Mt. Gox address," Meiklejohn said. In those cases, law enforcement would have minimal work to obtain the name of a user if they presented a legal order to Mt. Gox.

Money laundering is not impossible, but it is not particularly attractive with bitcoin. "It seems like an offshore account at this point would be a lot easier," she said.

Still, as long as bitcoin users are willing to take certain cumbersome steps, such as generating new bitcoin addresses for every transaction, staying off the exchanges and using other evasion techniques such as repeatedly forwarding funds, Bitcoin retains its privacy strengths.

"I do think inherently Bitcoin can provide you with a huge amount of anonymity, but the argument here is you have to work for it," Meiklejohn said. But most patterns of bitcoin use "indicate most users are falling short."