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10 People Arrested In the Netherlands For Bitcoin Laundering (reuters.com)
New submitter Incadenza writes: 10 people were arrested in the Netherlands today according to the Public Prosecution Service (In Dutch). The arrests were said to be part of an international investigation, including requests from the USA, Morocco, Australia and Lithuania. Apparently the investigators followed the trace from 'Bitcoin-cashers' (who convert the Bitcoin profits to old money) back to Bitcoin transactions on the Dark Web. How successful this was is yet to be seen, since all the main suspects are said to be 'cashers', not traders.
are so pro-Bitcoin. Their kind loves money laundering.
Let's shit on nerds.
This is good for bitcoin!
Really???
This is an article on /..?
You ****HAVE**** to launder bitcoin if you buy drugs on darknet markets. This is **common sense** practice to protect yourself.
Where is the news for nerds????????????????
I don't see any story here???
Fail.
The new name for "legal tender".
Or in other words: it might not be the best idea, for your illegal activities, to use a cryptocurrency: a type of money send/receive/exchange mecanism where...
THE WHOLE MECANISM (by design) RELIES ON BROADCASTING EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION TO THE NETWORK
(specially when your adversary is the state and could put the necessary Big Data Analysis to more or less track the money through the network)
The main advantage of bitcoin and other crypto currency protocol, is that there isn't a single entity in charge of the transactions, there's not a single point that you can block/ban.
Everything works by the network reaching a consensus.
To reach consensus, it means that every member of the network keeps a local copy of the blockchain: a local copy copy of the global "ledger".
And thus each single transaction is broadcast to the whole network to be appended (= mining) to this globally distributed ledger.
Thus each time some pothead buys weed with BTCs, that mean that every single member on the network is informed that $price BTCs were moved from the temporary wallet of the pothead generated for this transaction, to the temporary wallet of the seller generated for this transaction.
And thus an entity with enough computing ressources can track all the temporary wallets generated in all the various transaction, and after following a big enough bunch of such "crypto-money trails" (so they have enough confidence), they can zero down to a few suspect that they can investigate through regular police work.
And so the seller CAN'T COMMIT TAX FRAUD
(Lie about the money he earns, and pretend to earn less to escape from paying the taxes they are supposed to)
Which is illegal in most jurisdiction.
So the Dutch equivalent of the IRS got on their trail.
Yup, the tax service are typically the kind of state-level player that might shell out for the necessary resources to track the money.
Lying about your taxes is illegal nearly everywhere.
They also found out some where producing XTC as well.
Which, from what I know, is on the *hard drugs* list in the Netherland (like heroin, etc.) and thus still outright illegal.
Unlike the *light drugs* list (like various THC-containing Canabis derivatives, and like the last few mushroom which didn't get banned yet in 2008) which are considered a private affair for the consumer (it's their health, therefor it's their problem) and tolerated for selling within reasonable controller manner
(a small coffee shop selling a couple of joints per client ? Tolerated.
a huge operation exporting 2 tons of hashish per year on various illegal networks? Busted).
Some dutch /.er to step in to correct me ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Good job, US, AU, and Lithuania, for reaching across the vast expanse of the globe to track down these ten people.
I've never seen a prosecutor put out a press release that doesn't tout how many MILLIONS OF DOLLARS they've saved or recovered, or what the "street value" (often inflates 4x-10x is) but this time it seems nobody could actually put a value on it?
Undoubtedly all crime involving Bitcoin will now suffer a big hit. The dark nets are no longer dark. All will be well.
I can now sleep easier. Come here, Doge.
E
Use a Maytag.
Ooh, clean coins, shiney!
Let me switch that 1 and 0 by 1 and 0,,,,,yep,,,laundered
>The main advantage of bitcoin and other crypto currency protocol, is that there isn't a single entity in charge of the transactions, there's not a single point that you can block/ban.
Wrong and wrong. Hash.io has enough power to control the chain. Around 10 people basically control BTC
I was speaking about the general concept of the design.
Not the peculiarities of the implementation.
The bitcoin (and other cryptocoin protocol) are designed to eschew the need for a central entity (compared to other exchange protocols and platforms that need a central authority and couldn't work without one). By design, bitcoin doesn't need one, because by design it distributes the information across the whole network. And thus by design it CANNOT be anonymous. At best, it's pseudonymous (there are no Real Identities, so an user could seem anonymous at a quick glance). At worse one need to use complex coinmixing operation to manage to maintain anonymity.
The fact that a huge a part of the network is at the hand of few key player and in partice there's an oligarchy controlling it, isn't a result of the design (the protocol is designed without the need of an authority) but of how things have evolved practically for the current implementation:
BTC overly rely on Proof-of-Work (which at some point of time was important to attract new players to grow the network), and beyond that has focused on a specific PoW - a variant of Hashcash - that is computationnally simple, scale dramatically fast (each new generation of hardware completely leaves the older one in the dust) and thus in the long term works best for those with plenty of cheap electricity and cheap access to electronics.
Of which China has plenty (they have Three Rivers Dam, and they are the one who make the electronics for everyone else). So of course they'll end up being strongly advantaged, and few key chinese will hold much of the network's hashing power, and therefor would work as the de facto leader.
That doesn't change the design was to be without the need of a central authority, but be distributed accross a whole network (of which they simply managed to hold the most).
Or in short: The general idea behind the technology is interesting. The current bitcoin network is slowly turning into shit. But one doesn't change the other.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]