Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: RedDead on August 02, 2011, 09:03 pm
-
I just got done reading an article about how bitcoin can be traced. I read somewhere on the forums that SR has a bitcoin tumbler. What is it and how does it work? Does it prevent LE from from tracing the coin in case the SR server is seized?
-
Does it prevent LE from from tracing the coin in case the SR server is seized?
LE wouldn't need to seize the server to trace the BTC. That's the point of the tumbler.
BTC are tracable in their own right, because each BTC contains a history of all the wallets it has ever been through. That's kind of how BTC works. BTC is one huge motherfucking database that contains information about who owns BTC, and where they have all been. Blockexplorer can show you where your coins have been. Try it.
Without a tumbler, LE would be able to use Blockexplorer to see that a person sent a BTC to another. If they could grab one person in the chain, theoretically they could lean on that person and find more people in the chain.
A tumbler basically ensures that this becomes much more difficult, because it ensures that a seller isn't actually paid using the same BTC that the buyer pays in.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of BTC in SR at any one time. Think of that as a big pool of BTC, with the SR software keeping track of who has paid in, and who needs to be paid.
So *my* BTC don't actually go to the seller I deal with. My BTC go into the pool, and my seller gets his BTC out of the pool. Someone else gets my BTC.
(I have edited this post a couple of times, but I'll say the same thing I said first time around: I am not 100% sure I have it right, so please anyone correct me if I am wrong.)
-
I'm also speculating, but I bet they (or work with people) that mine bitcoins. You add all those new bitcoins to the pool, etc it would be very hard to say A came from B. Also, they state that they make dummy transactions to keep it almost 100 percent anonymous. That came from the guide, i think..
The tumbler is just one safety factor, dont rely on it. Always have your own "coinwashing" ways.
-
I think (speculate?) that @chronicpain and @myolddutch are both right. I still have a pet theory that SR was someone who mined a very large quantity of BTC and part of the plan with the SR marketplace is to monetize those BTC in an orderly fashion without depressing the value of the BTC and to acquire a certain amount of personal wealth to fund his "revolutionary" agenda(s). This may or may not be true and I don't expect any of us will ever know one way or the other.
I would really appreciate if SR would weigh in on this thread. If not to explain *how* the BTC are mixed at SR (as he may want to keep that opaque to prying eyes) then maybe just to let us know if putting our BTC in the SR account mixes them in approximately the same fashion as a properly operating tumbler would.
This would accomplish two things: 1. people could quit paying tumbler fees and 2. people could stop sending their BTC out to tumblers or other places that *might* end up going the way of MyBitcoin, some other tumblers, and other bitcoin operations that have proved to be either selective scammers or outright frauds.
For those who worry that *whatever* BTC they received back would show as having come from SR, I would venture to say that a very large percentage of the BTC now in circulation either have already, or will in the next year, touch SR at some point. Just like the advent of SR marketplace almost immediately quadrupled the number of worldwide BTC holders.
At this point I would much rather entrust an amount of 50-5000 BTC (if I were to ever have so many. haha!) with going on the SR marketplace site for 24-48 hours and then transferring them out to my personal BTC wallet than sending them to ANY other place I know of currently.
-
Thanks for the replies. If each bitcoin has a record of everyone it went to, wouldn't SR be safe because it's on Tor? Also you get a different address to send the bitcoins to in SR. Does that have an effect on the record in the bitcoin?
-
The tumbler was not an early addition to Silk Road and the first couple of implementations were somewhat traceable. I have not done an audit in a while but tracking my own bitcoin both in and out of Silk's mixer did confuse my manual tracing techniques. LE will have statistical analysis so confusing me is not a good test. Users should attempt to trace their own and see if they can identify Silk Road's main pool.
-
It's more about tracing back to particular wallets rather than the IP address used to send and receive transactions. They wouldn't trace how the btc got to your wallet but they would establish where it came from.