- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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I’m actually surprised that DPRK is unable to launder all that crypto. You would think that the crypto community would have at this point created fatter laundering pipelines.
Something I have been pondering is why when going after Bitcoin from crimes (ransom or stolen) they don’t just declare the individual “coins” stemming from illegal proceedings and that when they show up the “coins” will be confiscated and the holders investigated for money laundering. They have a serial number of sorts, right?
It should decrease the trade value of the “coins”, might even have the added benefit of scaring people of from the scam currencies. Ay, there might be the rub, for in this modern world of ours suppressing financial “innovations” is treated as worse than scams.
the other two answers are correct, but also they totally do. In particular, the blockchain analysis companies alert companies using their services to the transaction touching tainted coins. This is variably effective, of course.
But also, there are plenty of non-US/EU exchanges that don’t give a hoot and once tainted coins hit an exchange they’re washed because these exchanges are very good at having pretend KYC/AML.
Unfortunately, the coins are hard to track. They get exchanged for other cryptocurrencies and mixed in with other large wallets so noone can tell where the coins originally came from.
Bitcoins aren’t really discrete individual units like that. Imagine you send me 0.1 bitcoin and my mom sends me 0.1 bitcoin and I then send 0.1 bitcoin to Alice (ignore transaction fees and such). It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you, from my mom or some specific mixture of both. The blockchain just records increases and decreases of a wallet’s balance.
