Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.

“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.”

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    81·
    6 months ago

    How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?

    • bjorney@lemmy.caEnglish
      242·
      6 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

        • fluxion@lemmy.worldEnglish
          74·
          6 months ago

          Yes I laundered some of my salary from work. don’t report me please.

          • stown@sedd.itEnglish
            613·
            6 months ago

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

      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
        10·
        6 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.