“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”

    • @Snapz@lemmy.world
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      1710 months ago

      An article in Wired doesn’t speak to the “crypto space”, they speak to your aunt and uncle in Missouri who don’t know about this.

        • @Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world
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          410 months ago

          St. Louis has a decent tech scene, AT&T used to have their headquarters there. There’s still a large tech presence there, low cost of living drives tech companies to hire there since they can pay lower wages and no one in the area really cares since you can still get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month.

    • Otter
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      910 months ago

      How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?

      • bjorney
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        2510 months ago

        Every time there is a transaction the sender’s funds are mixed together with a bunch of other senders, and the recipients receive their money from this random pool, so there is no direct association between sender/receiver

            • stown
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              -710 months ago

              Well people like you aren’t the issue so much as you are the enablers.

          • prole
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            010 months ago

            I mean, pretty much yeah. I think it’s super clever and elegant, but I’m not going to lie to myself about what the main purpose for something like that would be.

            • @CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
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              1010 months ago

              The main purpose is to give privacy to digital transactions. Money laundering exists at a much larger scale within institutional banks like Deutsche and Credit Suisse (RIP)

            • @Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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              510 months ago

              Because protecting privacy is always a bad thing people wearing hoodies do while. Selling babies on the black market? God every corporation and your government wants you to think that so hard. Write your senator a letter about the dangers of this technology, they’ll probably email you a picture of the boner you gave them.

            • @BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              Meh, anymore I’m not making a distinction between supposed criminals and country level government (and really, state level either).

              Government is the single greatest source of crime IMO, because it offers deniability and the shield of legal violence against people.

              And I’m not just talking about things like Ruby Ridge- those are small scale, individuals. Iran-Contra, Fast and Furious, etc, etc.

              Look into the beginnings of OPEC and that cocksucker Nader.

              So yea, wanting to get the grubby gubmint fingers and eyes out of my shit makes sense.

        • @shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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          1110 months ago

          This is not quite correct. You do not have to involve anybody else in your transaction. What happens is the protocol takes a random selection of 15 other people who have spent money and adds them to a ring so that your transaction could be any one of 16 different outputs. But there is no mixing of funds involved.

      • prole
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        2110 months ago

        Monero is fucking genius actually, I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it, it’s actually incredible.

        Basically, they’ve created a way to make the entire thing opaque. Even the people sending the coin are unable to identify the person they’re sending to.

        I don’t hold any Monero, because I don’t see it as a good investment (no way governemnts allow something that powerfully opaque to thrive), but I respect the technology.

        • @tourist@lemmy.world
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          710 months ago

          I recommend reading about the cryptography and mathematics behind it

          Could most people understand it if they took the time or did the white paper require several niche latex packages to compile

    • @Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      -410 months ago

      And yet, crypto bros love pushing the false narrative that bitcoin is an untraceable currency of the future.

      In reality, anyone that’s looked into crypto in all its popular forms knows it’s just a ponzi scheme.