I'm not a fan or opponent of crypto, but the pervasiveness of child pornography is insane. I started doing sex work at 11 and was later human trafficked, and got a tattoo when I turned 18 near my groin, in large part to know what images and videos were of me underage. I consume and love porn, and have no shame in that, and I'm sure a lot of reposters think they are posting a barely legal image, but I have seen myself as a child online so many times in legitimate places, Tumblr, twitter, reddit, etc. This is a reality for so many people who have been abused, there was an article recently on here about MindGeek, and there efforts to make sure they didn't have child porn on their products, and the takedown of x tube and all of that change, but it's fucking hard. It's so much easier to tell if it's an 8 year old than a 15 year old, even though the trauma is similar for the victim. I don't know, I'm rambling, consume ethical pornography.
Thanks for taking the time to post this, and I'm sorry you had such a sh*tty start to life. I think it's important to repeat this over and over that the lines are so blurry with content online, and it's not really getting better.
The whole idea of ethical porn is something that needs more discussion, and it's an area where if you enjoy porn you should put your money where your ideals are and encourage something involving consenting adults respecting certain norms, and treating people involved with the human dignity they deserve. Paying to encourage those kinds of ethical productions is the only sensible solution, IMO. Endlessly frequenting copy-and-paste free content sites is a race to the bottom that isn't doing anyone any good.
In any case, I hope you have some people in your life who have shown you the respect you deserve as well, and been there to help when you needed it, and not just take what they could get from you whatever the cost.
lol, it wasn't shitty, it was weird. there have been maybe 10-20 horrible days in my life. I also got to hang out with every rock star I looked up to, and hang out with almost every celebrity I loved. I have a few left on the list, but, with great highs come great lows. And, I never smoked crack, so at least I can say that.
If it's your kind of thing, there are so many incredibly talented furry & anime digital artists who you can commission to draw beautiful & ethical art for adults, where no sentient beings were ever harmed in its creation.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. And sorry your childhood started how it did. Your story is important and more like it needs to be known more commonly.
A couple of weeks ago on a related topic I was getting down voted for expressing that the child in these images is revictimised every time their images are viewed and shared. The attitude was the harm was already done so there was no issues, but that is definitely not the case.
For a couple years around a decade ago I moderated a decent-sized but not massive subreddit and the frequency of child porn reports on there was chilling. It was every week at least. This was not at all a sexual sub, not even adjacent to porn or titillating images or anything.
Reddit was more permissive than they should have been for a lot longer than they should have been and may not be representative. But even accounting for that, it really opened my eyes to how common it can be.
This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship. Every time it was actually improved caused what felt like an internet-wide backlash against the changes.
The older I get, the more I believe the issue is with centralization (which the DMCA had a huge part in establishing).
What if there were no redit servers, and each subredit was self hosted? What would the incentive be for people to post child porn on some small independently run server?
As the subredit owner, you could just censor whoever you wanted, with very little global internet drama. Tools for autoflagging posts could still exist. Over-censored forums would piss off users, and be easily replaced. Similarly, under censored ones would lose users / get busted.
This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.
It still works for things like audio fiction podcasts, where "slush readers" filter submissions, and money / reputation are exchanged when stuff gets published. In addition to leading to much better moderation than the big Internet sites, it creates jobs for domain experts.
The main problem is that it doesn't scale to a $1B/mo business that investors can siphon money off of. Instead, it's best structured as an ecosystem of small botique businesses.
People don't need an incentive to upload disgusting or illegal content. They do it all the time just to annoy others. I built and ran a very small web app as a joke for a party, where friends could upload pictures of themselves drinking a beer. When I remembered it existed and went to take it down a year later, someone had registered an account and uploaded about a hundred megabytes of gore: images of dead or injured people.
Other friends have had the same problem with actual child pornography.
> What would the incentive be for people to post child porn on some small independently run server?
But... that's precisely what the article is about?
> The Korean agent showing Janczewski around eventually pointed the phone’s camera at a desktop computer on the floor of Son’s bedroom, a cheap-looking tower-style PC with its case open on one side. The computer’s guts revealed the hard drives that Son seemed to have added, one by one, as each drive had filled up with terabytes of child exploitation videos.
> This was the Welcome to Video server.
> "I was expecting some kind of glowing, ominous thing," Janczewski remembers, "and it was just this dumpy computer. It was just so strange. This dumpy computer, that had caused so much havoc around the world, was sitting on this kid’s floor."
Does the centralization make the situation worse? I agree that there's probably a larger total number of illegal materials shared on large sites, because they get the most traffic. I'm less convinced that that the same amount of user activity fragmented across a hundred different companies would see more effective enforcement. Remember, stats about how over 90% of CSE material reports to law enforcement come from Facebook is testament to how effective the reporting infrastructure is. I've also read articles about how Bing and Duck Duck Go are not as effective at filtering abuse material than Google - which is not an dig against the former, but an byproduct of lower available resources. I don't think decentralization would improve that.
> the more I believe the issue is with centralization
> This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.
Obviously this argument is inconsistent.
It's also wrong. The worst problem isn't with Reddit, it's with sites like the one reported in the article. These are exactly like the "under censored ones [sites]" you advocate for above. They don't lose users - they gain the types of users who want that kind of material.
> shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship
Not to defend the material in question in any way - but the people who expressed concern... were right. As soon as Reddit gave mods the tools they needed to expunge the really terrible stuff from the site, those tools were almost immediately used to ban completely unrelated conspiracy subs.
Why stop the tradeoff. Without the internet these things could not spread. Shut it down. People can take photos without permission from the government. Stop selling camera and charge camera resellers.
My information is very out of date but I'm curious how you know how unrelated they were.
My more-than-lay understanding is that the trading didn't happen in the open. Users used questionable comments, line-toeing images, and "jailbait jokes" to find each other and then swapped in DMs or off-site entirely.
Reddits mods have always had a rich grapevine. In my time I never once heard of a sub getting banned that didn't have a months or years long reputation for turning a blind eye to that. Possibly that completely changed after I left, sure.
You can ban all speech and it would end the spread of these images altogether, at least to the extent the law can be policed. The ends don't justify the means.
Okay, but we didn’t ban all speech, right? The collateral damage was mostly weird conspiracy theory subreddits and hate-based communities like r/fatpeoplehate. Given how it actually shook out, I think the ends absolutely justified the means.
If that happens, I’ll change my tune. I’m much more concerned with actual harm that’s currently happening than theoretical harm that may not even come to pass.
Can't you see the problem with holding as evidence your position of ignorance that anything is wrong with the situation as it stands, whilst the situation which you argue in support of is explicitly designed to impose that position of ignorance? It would be much the same as if you were blindfolded walking through a morgue and claiming that no death surrounds you because of your treasured blindfold.
You can't even know there's a problem until you can properly see the situation you're in, and if you advocate for measures that allow the apparent imposition of a false reality, you can't use that apparent false reality as evidence that "everything is OK and no theoretical harm has come to pass".
I fear nearly the entire world is awash in this nonsense and it gains purchase with every passing week. Everybody craves the illusion of normalcy and sees no sin in the truth being betrayed in pursuit of it, and then when that illusion falls away they scream blue murder that they were deceived, seemingly with complete ignorance of the fact that they begged for that deception, demanded its imposition, and vilified those who opposed it.
The truth always outs eventually, you can only hide from it for so long. And all you buy in the hiding is license for those who need your ignorance to operate, with all the harm that implies.
Could you give me an actual example of harm that happened to an undeserving community as a result of these policies, then? I am entirely open to being wrong, if you can provide a counter example.
To ask the question misses the point entirely and demonstrates the malfunction; In the presence of what I claim to be this optimal regime of information restriction which has concealed instances of what I am seeking to be informed of, inform me of these instances.
To cite just a few obvious examples from the past few years of social media censorship to cover up things the special interest groups in control of social media would rather have concealed; COVID Lab leak evidence, Hunter Biden laptop, Metabiota links, Ukraine Gas company positions, bribery being passed back up the chain, Daszak and EcoHealth alliance activities, etc. I know that all of these were vigorously attacked and suppressed over the past few years, and most people either knew nothing about them or believed them to be entirely false due to that active suppression, and they made critical life-changing decisions which altered the trajectory of the political and economic realities of the entire world based on those outright lies.
And here we sit, raising them as examples for somebody who started from a position of claiming they were unaware such things even existed because of their vaunted and optimal information control regimes. Whether you react with an admission that you were clearly wrong or doubling-down on it because you dislike the implications of the above is once again beside the point; Censorship of this kind is absolutely unacceptable and intolerable. It is a wholesale license for the censoring parties to sculpt the views of everybody to that which best serves the censoring parties interests. Nothing more, nothing less.
We are talking about Reddit. I’m saying we haven’t seen any real collateral damage from moderation policies aimed at preventing CSAM and hate-based communities.
I'm talking about the entirety of the new wave of "narrative sculpting", of which reddit is most definitely a significant part, by censorious mechanisms as an adjunct to what was previously a prevalent and well accepted viewpoint on the primacy of absolute free speech. The same tools that enable that censorship enable any kind of it, no matter what loaded description is used to justify the censorship.
If it honestly could be kept to purely policing cp and super intrusive gore spam, that would probably not be something worth getting up in arms about. The fact of the matter though is that it is near globally applied by this point in time to force the perspective that the owners of the centralised media services want and shut out every opposing view for as long as possible truth be damned. And that is utterly unacceptable. It is turning the world into a complete hellscape.
His system causes pain for the present and future. It is a system we know and have rejected. Another system may be worse but accepting his system assures pain for all now and in the future.
I think I need to know what definition you're writing from to have an opinion on that.
Moderated public discourse is the rule, not the exception, in vast spaces of human communication. It's not perfect but usually good.
In contrast, unfiltered bidirectional public communication can cause significant issues. It gave us 4chan and Reddit before the admins decided ad revenue was important to them.
Again the conflation of freedom of speech versus the freedom to be heard.
Freedom of speech means that the government can’t put you in jail for saying something stupid.
Censorship of privately owned online forums is entirely up to the forum. There is no high principle at stake there. In fact, censorship of this kind of forum is itself a kind of speech - so forcing someone to publish what you want them to publish, is also a form of suppression.
That doesn't make any sense. Mods (not Reddit employees) can't ban subreddits, because they only have control over their own subreddits. The admins (Reddit employees) did ban subreddits, but it had nothing to do with the new tools the admins gave to subreddit mods.
> This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship.
The solution is to put these vile pieces of sludge in prison forever, or execute them - not turn against liberty. This is a red herring for at least morally questionable people.
If executing people fits with your conception of liberty I think we have very different understandings of liberty, and what "morally questionable" means.
No. For the same reason that using deadly force to defend yourself from an attacker is justified and also “right”.
Of course you would cut off the second part of the sentence where I specifically reference people committing one of the most heinous crimes in order to make your “gotcha”. Perhaps trying to imply that I am not opposed to any and all uses of capital punishment when I am talking about a very specific crime. Frankly a pretty lazy attempt at building a straw man.
Capital punishment should be reserved for the absolute worst among us. Exploiting children for sexual gratification is one of them.
> The solution is to put these vile pieces of sludge in prison forever, or execute them - not turn against liberty
So, concretely, are you arguing that Reddit mods shouldn't have the power to shut down r/fatpeoplehate, but should have the power to permanently imprison or execute people?
> This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship. Every time it was actually improved caused what felt like an internet-wide backlash against the changes.
Child porn never add anything to do with "free-speech". I'm sorry but trying to link the 2 as they are somehow related issue is completely absurd. Reddit still has plenty of child porn, revenge porn and child grooming subs, so much that Reddit now keeps modlists hidden cause the depraved people Reddit hires as "supermods" apparently need that kind of protection to continue their misdeeds.
I hope one day that depraved website and its depraved admins and "supermods" get its day of reckoning, in a court of law.
> Child porn never add anything to do with "free-speech".
Well, they are related in that the tools needed to combat one can also be used to combat the other. If I can delete a post because [I believe] it contains child porn, I can also delete a post because it's saying something I don't like.
Holy mother of God. Hats off to you for "coming out" "normal". I know it is so so stupid of me to use the "normal" word but I wanted to celebrate your rescue, your enduring and the whole journey. Wouldn't wish it on anybody (even my worst enemy). Just reading this makes me so angry but I hope you are able to guide/provide safety to others based on your experience. Anything others can do in our daily lives to counter/attack this problem?
Umm, I honestly didn't have a problem with the sex work I did when I was younger until I was raped by NYPD officer at 17. I started off doing webcam shows, and I don't really have anything bad to say about it. I started prostitution at maybe 14, and it was honestly kinda fun, I don't recommend it, but a lot of the people paid for me thinking that I was an 18, if something bad happened I would pull the you just raped a child card, and have them empty their bank accounts at an ATM. And I still support sex workers. I was human trafficked not as a sex slave, but as a software and creative worker due to not having a visa in a country when I was about 19. I was being driven around in expensive cars and living in one of the poorest ghettos in the world. I didn't realize I was working for a gang until I had a package in my lap I was told not to look into, and obvi, I did and it was a brick of powder, so probably cocaine, but maybe heroin, and I kept doing the work, sleeping on my pile of clothes in a vermin infested home with plywood floors. I ran for my life when I came into the office and there was a pile of blood and a dead body. And when I say I ran for my life, I mean the physical act of running from people trying to murder me to shut me. Sorry for the vagueness, and lack of advice. Don't be a sex worker if you don't want to be raped, don't be lgbtqia+ if you don't want to be raped, and more than anything, don't be a woman. It's a reality for men as well, but most rapists are men, and most "victims" are women.
kinda fun is probably a trauma response, I thought I was one of Warhol's Superstars, the images and videos that persist are not things I consented to. What I should have said, was at the time I thought I was having fun, and a lot of the johns were very nice. But, there is a mental cost when you see your younger self in that position. You want to protect a person who no longer exists. I would never tell a 15 year old to do porn or be a hooker, or myself consume porn of that. And it felt innocent till I was violently raped the first time, I had innocence, I look like the boy next door, and maybe now the single dad next door, but I can't really answer this question with any sort of reasonable answer, there isn't one. Trauma makes you irrational
This is also a bannable offense on HN, regardless of how awful another comment is.
Actually I was about to ban the GP for what they posted, but what you did here is so egregious that people would complain if I did that but didn't also ban you. So you actually threw the moderation response out of whack with this.
In the future, flag the comment and email hn@ycombinator.com if more is needed. Don't post personal attacks and definitely don't do anything doxy.
I appreciate your work here Dang and if you have to ban me I understand. I felt that I had to do something, no matter how small, to prevent someone who would speak like that about an eleven year old being raped repeatedly from coming in contact with children. I'm sorry for any headache I caused you.
This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?
Here's what the Bitcoin whitepaper itself speculated.
"As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner."
And here's an early Bitcointalk thread. Traceability was discussed and acknowledged from the very beginning.
>This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?
There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of. It's this latter group of people that, by and large, as Bitcoin started to become popular, were under the impression that it was anonymous.
Edit: It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous," back in 2008[1]. To your point, he did say this as he linked to the white paper you mentioned, but average users are less likely to read the white paper than we are.
> "There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of."
In large part, "the average non-tech person" is not aware of a great many things because they actively ignore or dismiss those who know those things and try to warn them in advance of impending troubles they face due to their faulty Facebook acquired "knowledge" about any topic of great importance or significance (until after they're bitten in the ass by it, at which point they blame those same people they previously ignored). Network security issues are one easy example. We're ridiculed as "paranoid neck-beards" for calling out clear and obvious security issues right up until something bad happens and huge troves of personal/private data are leaked or stolen, and then we're raked over the coals for not somehow magically fixing an issue that we were previously told were "unimportant paranoid perfectionism".
How much sway does the “average journalist” have on Tech matters relative to, let’s say, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, etc. who have all publicly promoted crypto currency?
Thiel literally was calling out bank CEOs and Warren Buffett a day or so ago for preventing the future.
They’re not preventing the future so much as they are not buying into the hype. That speech from Thiel was totally unprofessional and ill-suited to man of his station. If he’s so confident about crypto, he doesn’t need to insult successful people to achieve his aims. I’ll take the classiness of a Warren Buffet over that meanness any day.
What interests me is that so many people discuss the same thing and still seem to come away with entirely different takes.
You can be anonymous if you deal with BTC exclusively just as though you would with cash. But, and this is a very big but: if you use the same addresses repeatedly or if the addresses that you use can be linked and your identity can be tied to one of the addresses then all of your linked transactions are now no longer anonymous.
So you're anonymous right up to the point that you aren't, and then it works retroactively on anything that can be tied to that same identity.
Cash doesn't really have that property, and is therefore more anonymous than BTC, anonymity is in principle a boolean but there appear to be grades of anonymity when you start looking at it more closely. Anonymity as in 'the state of knowledge about an individual' vs 'anonymity, the level of anonymity that an individual can expect as the use of a particular method of payment' are two different concepts that we lump together as though they are the same thing.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It's baked into the protocol. Every transaction is public, and authenticated and authorized via cryptography. But every transaction has a name attached... Just not a name immediately linked to the human being responsible for executing the transaction.
Once that link is made, the blockchain becomes a towering monument to all that name's sins.
Contrast with a chan site, where the default configuration is that every post has a unique identifier independent from any posts previously made by an author. Depending on what data the administrator is collecting, those posts may be reversible to a human being, but tugging on one piece of the thread does not unravel the tapestry because a person's posts aren't tied to each other by default.
(HN is pseudonymous too. I post under a handle. I prefer not to link this handle to my public name. It would not take much effort to do so, and once somebody did, every comment I've ever made is immediately searchable).
> It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous"
Am I nitpicking if I say that's actually true? Anonymous means "not identified by name; of unknown identity". Disguised people can also be anonymous. The fine print is that your disguise won't help you much when you go visit your family and you're subject to gait profiling.
I agree with your first paragraph but your edit is repeating the same non-sequitur made by the article. I don't know why journalists and people in these discussions keep referring back to Satoshi's statements as if they mean anything. The average non-tech person still has no idea who that is, will never care who that is, was not following bitcoin back in 2008 and has no reason to care about a random comment on a mailing list or in a whitepaper. The average cryptographer or hardcore blockchain person also probably has no reason to care about them. The only reason to bring it up at all just seems to be part of the myth-building.
>The only reason to bring it up at all just seems to be part of the myth-building.
I don't understand how this can be what you think I'm getting at, when my post was myth-busting. You agree with me that most average, non-tech-oriented people seemed to misunderstand that Bitcoin was largely anonymous. Now, those assumptions had to come from somewhere, right? I'm not saying they know who Satoshi is, or what a Bitcoin whitepaper is at all, nor am I saying Satoshi should be lionized or mythologized. But what I am doing is pointing to rhetoric used early on in Bitcoin's life that could've easily made it's way into the lexicon of the less technically-minded and explain how we ended up there.
An analysis of how the myth was built, as it were, rather than further building of the myth.
Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot of sense. But I honestly don't think you could chalk it up to any statements made by Satoshi or anyone else in particular. The tech press in general has a problem with not understanding cryptography or "privacy tech" or whatever. That's not a new thing. It really doesn't help that in the last several years there are privacycoin pushers who muddy the waters with confusing marketing statements that are misleading to anyone who doesn't bury themselves in crypto jargon.
Because of BTC's prominence on darknet markets, people who hadn't heard of it naively assumed it wasn't traceable.
It's reasonable to assume that if you were purchasing illicit substances online, that the currency wouldn't be traceable, when it reality it was because no one really cared at the time for this new bitcoin thing.
Keep in mind how most people don't read documentation for anything, let alone a whitepaper
I probably am not alone, but if I hadn't wasted money on drugs a decade ago and had just kept the bitcoin I would be a rich person. No one I know read a white paper back then, we just found the Wild West, snorted, shot and popped it up
That seems largely correct, Monero came out in 2014, so I think it was a combination of law enforcement becoming more familiar with how to track BTC payments and markets realizing there's a better alternative.
I think the fact that the U.S. Government put out a bounty for cracking Monero shows that it's working fairly well so far
The thing about monero, is that even if it is impossible to track today, all the transactions are still in the public blockchain, even if heavily obfuscated. It is quite possible that it eventually will be cracked and all historical transactions deobfuscated. Then it becomes as simple to track things down as bitcoin is today.
If this ever happens, it could lead to a massive wave of crime resolution on par with what happened when DNA testing became cheap and ubiquitous.
Because of this, when it comes to significant organized crime, physical cash and seedy banks like Chase and Deustche Bank are still king.
Bitcoin is for people who don't mind living in the light.
The article mentions several times how criminal naivete over the untraceability of Bitcoin aided the investigation - so why let the cat out of the bag now? It might be just that the IRS thinks it is not getting enough respect, but another theory is that Bitcoin is becoming known as being traceable, alternatives like Monero are currently effective, and the hope is to spread FUD by association and the implicit threat of future retroactive traceability.
To be clear, if that is the case, I have no objection.
I would go further and say that most of the users of this site thought bitcoin was untraceable too. If they knew they needed to mix their bitcoins if they didn't want to government figuring out that they bought/sold child porn they absolutely would've done that.
Why does that make this article terrible? The criminals involved believed that Bitcoin was untraceable, as does your every day non-technical person, and the article explains how that isn't the case.
They do now. Governments know they have to act very decisively on these kinds of markets and activities because each time they act it galvanizes everyone to implement the more resilient technology.
This is the antifragile nature that some proponents acknowledge and like.
Before there is proof of a state action, forums go back and forth ad nauseum on what level of work and inconvenience is necessary. After there is proof of a state action, they just go ahead and implement the multisig escrow (making sure consumers and merchants can get their money even if the government seizes the servers, greatly increasing the costs for the government while lowering the bounty collected) privacy enhanced coins (like Monero), contribute to UI/UX improvements for making Monero easier to use, etc
If you look at these darknet busts, the level of effort and coordination has gone up by orders of magnitude over the last decade while the amounts seized have gone down.
What are the biggest and most reputable darknet markets currently? Do they still get taken down frequently? My understanding is that it's easy for state-level actors to unmask hidden service IPs through traffic correlation attacks
Not sure, the way I would find out is open Tor browser and go to dark.fail and then switch to the onion service version of the site (the browser might prompt you, but there should be one on dark.fail to copy and paste)
Then just use that site like normal and it will have a list of popular onion services like the New York Times and Dread and also including darknet markets (DNMs) and their mirrors, and the liveness of those URLs
Then I would go on Dread (if its up) and see what people are saying about any particular DNM, else I would find the darknet market subreddit to see if there is anything there, else find articles about current top markets. some last for so long and are still lasting that they're pretty reliable, so I would probably skip all this if I've still got credentials to one thats still up. its a hassle to sign up to some markets and some more secure ones so it thwarts my curiosity
for just browsing those sites I'm fine with Tor browser, but if you actually want to buy things or download things or communicate with a vendor I would say stick with Whonix (or Tails if thats fine for you) because you need other apps and having Tor for all connections and other anonyming techniques at all times is better.
(if you are going to a site with more objectionable content for even viewing, don't use Tor browser either. dark.fail doesn't list those)
Thanks. I've been out of that world for roughly a decade, it's neat to see a more resilient social ecosystem emerging around these markets. I'm still sort of surprised that the three letter agencies can't just immediately unmask the server IP of new markets when they pop up and take them down immediately
DNMs are several orders of magnitude larger than the Silk Road days and all the technology is way better, Tor is super fast(ish) but that’s partially because the exit nodes and relay nodes are (probably) adversaries lol
Cat and mouse game. They're trying timing attacks all the time while improving the UX, assuming “they” are state actors
yeah even my accomplished professional colleagues will randomly (but predictably) make a quip about not reporting taxes just because they opened a Coinbase account, or finally moved a token onchain once.
I don't think thats a crypto specific perspective, as there is this super large population in this country (USA) that only has the experience of their employer taking a big chunk of their money for the whole year and giving it to the government automatically, so a lot (most?) of that population thinks that any situation where they have something valuable on their own has no way of being known about for taxes. Crypto amplifies that myth to those people, when its just a total misunderstanding about how taxes and tax reporting works, and how the blockchain works, and what organizations already exist to specialize in watching the blockchain as well as trades at exchanges.
It's non-trivial to go from a list of transactions to having a nicely indexed DB with convenient tools for investigating.
It's correct that you can trace transactions through the blockchain, but in practice you need something like Reactor to be built and maintained. It's not going to be obvious to police, because the skill is a specialized thing in the domain of coders, and those coders have to have a reason to look at blockchain.
The police department will ask IT, they will Google it, and tell the cops to use one of the various commercial options used to deanonymize wallets and transaction trails. A credit card payment or trial sign-up later and if the service is any good, they'll have what they need.
I'd put anything available to the general public in the "trivial" camp, even if the underlying tech is fantastically complex or difficult.
Is that widely used? There's a world of difference between "theoretically possible" and "commonly used", and I'm not familiar enough to know which this is.
For Gambaryan and Janczewski, the story was utterly typical. IRS-CI agents did shoe-leather detective work, carried guns, and made arrests, just like their FBI and DEA counterparts. But because of the IRS’s dowdy public image, they often found that fellow agents treated them like accountants. “Don’t audit me,” their peers from other law enforcement branches would joke when they were introduced in meetings. Most IRS-CI agents had heard the line enough times that it warranted an instant eye roll.
Reminds me of the postal inspector who blew open the case of two foreign agents with sniper rifles and other weapons impersonating federal officers in Washington DC.
The Secret Service believed their B.S. story about being DHS investigators working on J6 investigations. 4 SS agents apparently took bribes from them, including one who protects the president's wife.
>Law enforcement sources told CBS News that investigators are looking into the possibility that the two suspects have ties to Iranian intelligence including to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite component of the Iranian military that conducts special operations, or the Quds force.
…
>The FBI also singled out a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) employee who interacted with Taherzadeh and is listed among DHS personnel who received gifts from suspects in the affidavit. According to a senior DHS official, the current employee, who does not serve in a law enforcement capacity, has not been put on administrative leave and is not the subject of any internal review.
That sounds like something pretty bad was brewing there. That postal inspector did better than the Secret Service, which in a normal world shouldn't be remotely possible.
Yes, but really: in a role like that accepting gifts without immediately reporting even the attempt of such gifts up the chain to ask for guidance on how to play it seems to be beyond stupid, that's not just your garden level variety of incompetence but something entirely different.
They’ve gone through countless hours of ethics courses, including (at minimum) a yearly refresher that covers _exactly_ what to do if you feel like you’re being bribed, etc.
> Joe Biden is expected to receive Secret Service protection with a new team that is more familiar to him and replacing some agents amid concerns that they may be politically allied with Donald Trump.
Two buddies from the office were former SS. Really nice guys, apparently not the service that hires the smartest people. Their boss was a Marine and the joke was that he could only be the boss of former secret service agents because all other federal agencies hired people smarter than him.
>He right-clicked on the page and chose “View page source” from the resulting menu.
>...
>He spotted what he was looking for almost instantly: an IP address. In fact, to Gambaryan’s
>surprise, every thumbnail image on the site seemed to display, within the site’s HTML, the IP >address of the server where it was physically hosted: 121.185.153.64.
That is indeed an opsec failure, along with using that same IP on an exchange. Which later turns out to be a computer aka the abuse website in the guys apartment.
Bitcoin is the polar opposite of an untraceable currency. This is a strangely repeated claim.
The whole point of bitcoin is trustless action. I don't have to trust you because I can verify the transaction.
If anyone can verify a transaction, it's obviously traceable.
I think the confusion seems from the fact that you do not need to issue a form of identity to use bitcoin. Which is how cash works too.
If your intention is to turn bitcoin into fiat, you will be found out. Fiat is highly regulated, your identity is required. Unless you turned bitcoin into pure cash, which is unlikely at scale.
"Ah but Monero" no. Monero requires you to trust the authors because you can't verify any of the transactions, especially the genesis blocks. Use at your own peril. Bitcoin does not in anyway attempt to mirror this.
Half the value of a bank is that the bank authenticates transactions have actually happened. Bitcoin does too. Publicly. There's nothing "anonymous" about it. There's just no requirement to tie an address to a human identity, but that doesn't mean it can't be done (and you should always act like it has been done, lest the law come for you too).
The idea that crytocurrencies empower criminals because they're anonymous is braindead. There's a lower barrier of entry but scams are older than Central economies are. Crypto is just the newest vehicle and getting rid of crypto will not get rid of scammers (or ransomware).
>The whole point of bitcoin is trustless action. I don't have to trust you because I can verify the transaction.
If anyone can verify a transaction, it's obviously traceable.
But you do not need everyone to verify but instead take a shortcut and just verify the proof. That's what zero knowledge proofs are all about [0]. Unfortunately a lot of people pass over these subtleties. So, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "verify".
>"Ah but Monero" no. Monero requires you to trust the authors because you can't verify any of the transactions, especially the genesis blocks. Use at your own peril.
Can you elaborate on this point?
By "verify" again, you simply mean a transparent blockchain where every tx and address is unambiguously visible to all. E.g. Ring signatures aren't something you need to trust the authors.[1][2]
But in general, yes, at some point without being able to "verify" the whole code I have to "trust". This is true for every sufficiently large enterprise. For example there are a lot of (complicated) mathematical proofs I didn't fully go through but nonetheless used shamelessly in my mathematical modeling because I "trusted" its applications (I have learned from).
Zero-knowledge proofs are coming. Zcash and Monero do some on chain obfuscation with I believe an ECC based DH? But they point is, coinfolk are working on it.
"He was taken aback by what he saw: Many of this child abuse site’s users—and, by all appearances, its administrators—had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails. An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him."
It is a weird story. On the one end, anyone using crypto by now should know, there is a trail following it ( there are means to obscure it, but a lot of ways to screw up too ). On the other, does that mean this investigation was a low hanging fruit?
My experience with friends in law enforcement is that what defines the majority criminals is a lack of understanding of risk. That lack creates a strong sense of "I know how to get away with this."
I remember a story of a guy being busted who ran a business, bought his $500k house in cash, his half dozen trucks in cash, and yet paid almost nothing in taxes. The thought was, "I'll under-report my income, and pay everything all in cash so they can't trace anything!" Except for the fact that transactions over $10K get reported to the IRS, not to mention all of the property to various agencies which circle back to the IRS.
People who have a least a clue what could go wrong tend to also realize they probably aren't seeing other ways for it go wrong, as well.
Used to be worth about $65,000. This will probably be a requirement when $10,000 is worth $1,000 of today's dollars--do nothing, and more and more stuff comes under reporting requirements.
Ridiculous that these things aren't inflation adjusted. I ended up paying the alternative minimum tax once, the old "millionaire's tax". Spoiler: I'm not a millionaire. If I was, millionaire isn't what it used to be, either. https://www.thebalance.com/alternative-minimum-tax-amt-who-h...
1. Clued up criminals will choose crimes that are less risky.
2. The more ignorant the criminal is, the more likely they are to be caught.
3. When you are smart enough, there are legal ways to make criminal amounts of money.
Smart people either avoid crimes, or they avoid getting caught, or they do crimes with low penalties (some white collar crimes can have very high expected gains).
Yes, absolutely. The same law that provides for banks reporting deposits and withdrawals over $10K also puts similar requirements on retail establishments that accept payments that large.
Although in practice they're probably buying a $9k salvage truck in cash, then paying mechanics in cash to fix it up to be a $75k truck.
The same thing happens with houses. Someone buys an absolute dumpster fire in cash. Then they pay contractors to fix it up nice, beautiful appliances, tiling etc. The house gets sold and the money ends up all in the white.
IDK. The bank reports that the J. Random Chevrolet dealer deposited $75,000. The bank doesn't know where that came from. They don't know if it represents 75 $1,000 cars or one $75,000 car.
I used to work at a restaurant that regularly deposited more than $10,000 cash per day. We never filed any IRS reports for that, maybe the bank did.
I bought a car a few years ago half cash, half financing. The dealer sent me a letter stating that they notified the IRS under their obligation to report cash transactions over $10K.
In order to use crypto secretly you have to heavily launder your money in a way that’s not easy or guaranteed to work.. and the laundering itself is a crime which isn’t so easy to hide.
People think it’s private because they are told so but actually it’s a public ledger where anyone can see what you’ve spent and associate you fairly easily by your behavior and links to not so secret crypto addresses.
Not really. You buy mining resources to mine it as opposed to purchasing already mined bitcoin.
There’s rarely any paper trail between buying GPUs/ASICs and the mining itself. That’s why these currently sell above the amount they’d be profitable mining with. Because illicit actors are willing to pay a premium for anonymous crypto.
Where can you buy GPUs/ASICs with crypto? Or are you just talking about the buyers? If the sellers get spooked I'm not sure it matters if buyers are safe.
> In order to use crypto secretly you have to heavily launder your money in a way that’s not easy or guaranteed to work.. and the laundering itself is a crime which isn’t so easy to hide.
Or you use Monero, which as far as I know is not illegal, let alone a crime.
We've been getting increasingly involved in crypto investigation discussions, and largely:
- money side is getting more anonymous, e.g., monero / tornado
- ... in theory. Money crime still often using less anonymous schemes and often at exchange points, so chainanalysis-style companies still make sense, though decreasingly so IMO. A lot of the startups have shifted to verifying contracts, or providing (dubious) KYC risk scores, and interesting to consider why.
- For our customer base (half of which are sec/fraud/crime teams)... what's happening is the criminal platforms + participants have broken (digital) operational security. So it is more about offchain data (app logs, ...) and sometimes combining onchain<>offchain data.
So not too different from our projects tracking malware/phishing/misinformation/etc via OSINT techniques (IP addresses, unmasked metadata, ...), or detecting account takeovers on their websites
- ... more new, IMO, in this space is areas like graph neural networks that have the potential to act smarter & more automatically, e.g., understanding behavior. Very early days here though, so interesting times !
I don't think it was low-hanging at the time (2017). They had to figure out how to trace the bitcoin chain to unmask users. They also had to cast a wide international net with different jurisdictions and rules to get the people arrested by their locality.
Now having a clearnet IP address over Tor website, as well as converting straight to fiat using standard exchanges is about as low-hanging as it gets.
No single technology is a magic bullet for privacy.
In the article, there were many users with low technical competence interacting with a central criminal site that, itself, made some pretty glaring mistakes. The stupidity of all is what made them easy to catch.
What if the central site had not left its IP out in plain sight? Its operators would still likely have been caught because many of the bitcoins they were cashing out could have been tracked due to mistakes made by the site's users. Then, once the site's servers were captured, it's data could have been used to track down users who had made fewer mistakes.
Will future sites and users make the same mistakes? Probably less frequently, but they'll make new mistakes too. Law enforcement will adapt and come up with new ways to track criminals down. No system with users can ever be totally secure.
On the other hand, you can do a lot better if you cut down the number of users. e.g. If criminals hack a company's servers and extract a ransom, the transaction will probably have a much higher standard of anonymity because the hackers are more security minded and can specify how their victim acquires cryptocurrency and transfers it.
The crypto haters and maxis are both right and wrong at the same time. Bitcoin isn't private if you aren't careful and knowledgeable, but bitcoin absolutely can be used for crime if it's the right kind of crime. We're currently seeing a renaissance in ransomware attacks thanks to bitcoin.
2. The launderer can buy an artists whole collection, and legitimately sell some for more than they were bought for since everyone can see the artists NFTs are selling for huge sums
3.NFTs can pay the minter a percentage every time they're sold.
The conventional art world generally has more requirements in terms of reporting. Also, in the conventional art world people would be extremely suspicious if all of an artist’s works were bought up by anonymous individuals and nearly immediately turned around for significant profit - but with NFTs it’s par for the course.
I'm probably slightly tempered from just having read this article, but curious how anyone could confidently arrive at an economic estimate of the global trade in CSAM
The article mentions extradition, so I would like to hijack this thread to disscuss that. Don't you think that extradition is something like a custom from an age of slave trade? Queens and Presidents trade their citizens like slaves. A person born in one country, protected by its Constitution, gets brought into other country where none of constitutional rights apply any more, where he doesn't know local laws and local language, doesn't have a lawyer, doesn't know his rights and where he cannot defend himself as well as in his own country. Furthermore, a crime he has commited might be punished much more strictly in that other country, for example, 20 years instead of 4 years and additionally he can be charged with crimes that are not a crime in his country and wouldn't allow to extradite him. Also, that country might not allow criminal's family to visit him in prison (the right that he had in the country of origin).
How is this compatible with human rights? The proper process should be like this: if country A thinks that someone from country B has commited a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges. This is the only way where the defendand won't be stripped of their rights.
Am I missing something here and there are valid reasons why prosecution for international crime cannot be implemented like this?
Extradition is generally thought of as when a person from country A who is convicted of a crime in A flees to country B, and country B then extradites said person to country A to serve out their sentence.
It's not meant to be a system to convict people incapable of defending themselves in a foreign court.
Plus, there are extradition treaties: countries A and B have to _agree_ to the conditions under which A will extradite to B and under which B will extradite to A.
> The proper process should be like this: if country A thinks that someone from country B has committed a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges.
Courts in country B generally have close to zero understanding of the legal minutiae of country A. Ignoring jurisdiction questions, what you're suggesting is that courts in country B have to:
* understand the hierarchy of the legal system in A (what precedent is binding, what precedent is advisory),
* understand what is and isn't a law (e.g. if A is a common law jurisdiction and B is not),
* somehow reconcile legal procedures in A with legal procedures in B (e.g. when are you allowed to ask the judge to dismiss a case? what's an acceptable situation to ask for N more weeks for discovery? how much time is considered reasonable? who do you file paperwork with?)
* somehow decide what constitutes a qualified attorney (e.g. in the U.S., every state has its own qualification process for attorneys to practice in that state, so being admitted to the bar in Colorado doesn't mean you can practice in Florida, and this also extends to the federal govt)
and goodness knows what else.
In general it's good to assume that if there are millions of people in a given system, there are _reasons_ (not necessarily good ones, just plausible ones) the system works that way, particularly when it's a system you have zero understanding of.
That is more or less how it works. You will notice that Son Jong-woo was not extradited to the USA. The US government presented its case to Korea (via Korean attorneys hired for the purpose, I suppose), claiming that, according to the treaty, Son Jong-woo should be extradited, and the Korean court demurred.
See also the Assange case in Britain: "Julian Assange, the 50-year-old founder of Wikileaks, is a step closer to being extradited from Britain to the United States after the U.S. government won an appeal in London's High Court." [my emphasis.]
Extradition treaties are supposed to be the law in both countries, and country B is nominally under no obligation to accept terms in a treaty that are counter to its own principles. Asymmetric power and corruption mean that this is not always the case, of course...
No, extradition is unfair. Let's say someone did X, Y and Z where X is punishable in both countries, and Y and Z is only punishable in USA. If he stays in his country, he gets a punishment only for X, but if extradited to USA, he gets a punishment for Y and Z also. Although his country's laws allowed him to do Y and Z.
The answer in this scenario is the same as before: if the extraditing country, aware that this is a possibility, allows the extradition to go ahead, then the person extradited has been subject to due process in their country.
In addition, the victims of Y and Z may reasonably consider it unfair if the perpetrator avoids prosecution on this basis. If Y and Z were a crime in in the perpetrator's country, it would not be unfair for him to be prosecuted for them, even if the evidence, or his being in custody, came only from his being arrested for X; this happens quite frequently.
It also sometimes happens that extradition is made conditional - for example, on the condition that the person is not subject to the death penalty. For a couple of obvious reasons, reneging on such an agreement after the extradition would have negative long-term consequences for the country that does it.
> How is this compatible with human rights? The proper process should be like this: if country A thinks that someone from country B has commited a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges. This is the only way where the defendand won't be stripped of their rights.
Countries have treaties with each other, trying to make extradition treaties akin to slavery is completely absurd.
EU nations have extradition treaties, despite having different laws regarding different crimes. It is compatible with "human rights" cause citizens have rights but also duties established by their respective countries constitutions, and EU nation constitutions acknowledge that a crime committed, physically or remotely, in one nation makes the citizen of one country subject to the law of the other EU country where the crime was committed, period. Is that what you consider "slavery"?
Yes, because a citizen is forcible removed from his native country. And because he can get much more severe punishment that we would get in his own country.
Let's say someone from country A uses a stoled credit card which is punished with 1 year of prison in A and 5 years of prison in B. Also (what a careless mistake), he speaks ill of the Queen and the Party which is not a crime in A, but is punished with 5 years of prison in B.
If he is prosecuted in A, he gets 1 year of prison. If he gets extradited he gets 10 years of prison and gets a punishment for a deed that is not a crime in his own country. How can this be fair? The laws of his country guaranteed that he would be free one year later and that he could speak ill of Queen.
Let's say country A has treaties with 50 other countries. This means that now citizens of A must learn laws of all those countries in order not to break them.
if you think that extradition is fair, would you agree to extradite people to countries like China, Russia or North Korea?
> Yes, because a citizen is forcible removed from his native country. And because he can get much more severe punishment that we would get in his own country.
And? As I said citizens have rights but also duties as citizens, and constitutions establish these rights and duties. If a countries constitution acknowledges a supra-national treaty or authority, which is their rights as free and independent countries, then none of the defendant rights are getting violated provided the extradition treaty grants due process to contest that extradition.
So being hyperbolic by claiming it's equal to "slavery", in an attempt at appealing to emotion, just makes your argument sound unhinged, at best. What's next? Extradition treaties are "racist"?
> if country A thinks that someone from country B has commited a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges
Generally if someone wants to extradite from the UK to the US (for instance) there will be extradition hearings to decide whether the request is reasonable, whether there is a case to answer, and things will be guaranteed in line with the rights of the UK individual - for instance if the crime in the US could be punished with death, the UK will require that be taken off the table before extradition. They would also seek assurances of the treatment of their citizen.
The exact resolution to this -
> for example, 20 years instead of 4 years and additionally he can be charged with crimes that are not a crime in his country and wouldn't allow to extradite him
Is likely contained in the treaties between countries. It seems to me that such a treaty should absolutely have a "that's not even a crime here" provision, but I have no real idea if they do.
The problem with internet crime in particular is the question of where it was committed. If I sit here in my office in Australia, log on to a compromised server in South America somewhere, and from there I compromise an American individual's home PC and empty their bank account, where is the crime taking place? Where the perp is, or where the victim is? It's not that straightforward.
> for instance if the crime in the US could be punished with death, the UK will require that be taken off the table before extradition.
I am surprised that anyone can be fooled by this. If USA cannot sentence someone to death, they still can sentence him to 500 years in prison which is basically the same and doesn't violate any agreements.
> Is likely contained in the treaties between countries. It seems to me that such a treaty should absolutely have a "that's not even a crime here" provision, but I have no real idea if they do
Obviously there is no such rules. The article mentions that if the owner of the server would get extradited from North Korea to USA he could get more strict punishment.
> If USA cannot sentence someone to death, they still can sentence him to 500 years in prison which is basically the same
It's not considered the same by countries which (for instance) have indefinite detention for the worst offenders, but do not have the death penalty.
> Obviously there is no such rules. The article mentions that if the owner of the server would get extradited from North Korea to USA he could get more strict punishment.
As I said, that's likely to come down to the individual treaties. But in this case it was considered a crime in his home nation, just not anywhere near as serious a crime.
You can live a whole life not leaving your country. If you leave your country, you subject yourself to the jurisdiction of wherever you go. While you're in that other country, they can arrest you and put you through their system. Why should you be allowed to commit a crime, and just because you got away with it long enough to flee the country, not be sent back to the place you committed it?
For what it's worth, some countries do refuse to extradite their own citizens, and will instead try their own citizens for their foreign crimes if they think there's enough evidence and severity. But that's not necessarily a better system. The evidence is in a foreign country, and you can't effectively subpoena people in foreign countries to make them produce documents or take the stand.
> You can live a whole life not leaving your country.
As I undertand, that doesn't prevent you from being extradited. Here are quotes from the article which hint at that:
> US prosecutors, including Faruqui, had argued that he [South Korean citizen who owned a server] should be extradited to the United States to face charges in the American justice system, but Korea had denied their request.
> With the help of the Dutch national police, they arrested the site’s alleged administrator in the Netherlands, a man named Michael Rahim Mohammad, who went by the online handle “Mr. Dark.” He faces criminal charges in the US, and his case is ongoing.
> For what it's worth, some countries do refuse to extradite their own citizens
And that is a right thing.
> The evidence is in a foreign country, and you can't effectively subpoena people in foreign countries to make them produce documents or take the stand.
The prosecutors from a foreign country can gather evidence themselves.
Since the start of the pandemic, two years, I've used cash a handful of times.
People who use cash now stand out as suspicious almost.
The rest of us are an open book.
Privacy is dead unless we get a truly untraceable cryptocurrency that is in general use.
Privacy is a right and shouldn't be taken away to supposedly make it harder for the minority to get away with crime. It doesn't because what they'll do is use mules and proxies to mask themselves creating a new layer of victims in the process.
As with anti-laundering legislation, the law-abiding are the ones punished by their lives being made more difficult.
Sorry if this is too long form for HN, but if you read the article you clearly have some patience as well.
I'm surprised all the comments here seem to be solely around the technical details with blockchain and crypto. It's HN, I get the technical bent and find it interesting as well, but the human side of this one is pretty rough, and it made me appreciate that there are people -- likely sorely underpaid relative to what they'd make elsewhere -- following these (sordid) threads, often at significant emotional cost to themselves.
I did appreciate the odd bits of relief like 'Bitcoin Jesus' and 'Octopus Guy':
> At one point Faruqui remembers a German official asking him, as they stood in the cold outside the Seoul hotel where they were staying, how the Americans had gotten the Koreans on board so quickly. “Oh, Octopus Guy,” Faruqui had explained. “You don’t have Octopus Guy. We have Octopus Guy.”
But mostly, humor aside, it made me wonder for the 1000th time if I'm making the right career and life choices myself in a comfy, well paid job where I'm probably near the top of the pyramid in terms of professional respect, working on problems that I think have reach and import in my narrow speciality ... but am I really solving the problems that matter? I'm not in advertising (thank whatever god you imagine), more in security lately, so the work isn't meaningless ... but I work with some brilliant people whose technical capacities I admire, and I wonder what would happen if a bit more of that gray matter was directed at solving some of the terrible problems described here?
So much money is invested in understanding the psychology of how to force better engagement and squeeze out every last penny of hapless consumers in whatever social network. What would happen if a fraction of that went into trying to focus on influencing the people making these awful, life-destroying choices and somehow (re)sensitizing them to the costs of their actions and navigating them away from that preventatively, even if the success rate is only 1-2 percent? Or identifying victims of abuse through posting patterns to try to make sure they're potentially being flagged to receive content and help they may not be able to believe even exists? How much is invested in psychological profiling to maximize profit for the most banal advertising ends, when maybe for once some of that gray matter making those algorithms could do something positive identifying patterns indicative of abuse, beyond just the current simple fig leaf approach to pretend the owners of your social network of choice cares about your well being.
I'd love to do better, and I'd take a decent pay cut if I felt I could do something for that, and maybe even get to feel a bit better as a person in this weird world as a side effect. Seems like we not only should but could do a lot more here, before this gets to the criminal investigation level.
I have to feel that on some level, actively seeking out jobs where you review CSAM on a daily basis should be at least something of a red flag to those employers.
Indeed, I'd hate to be the recruiter for that. I can't imagine the kind of psychological profile you'd need for something like that. The end of the article describes the psychological cost the investigation had on the investigators who were parents themselves.
But even at an algorithmic level, it seems like there are all kinds of red flags you could pull out of public posts and do a much better job of redirecting potentially victimized people to some organisations doing meaningful work to help victims.
How many categories does my online profile fit in based on all my interests, and how many hundreds of bright people are wasting their lives to discern that I happen to like A + B + C and I'm in financial bracket F, with political leaning G ... to try to show me an advert I'm probably just blocking anyway.
Is there any real way to be anonymous while using Bitcoin and actually exchanging it to fiat currency? Are there any exchanges that are not regulated and don't require any authentication e.g. an ATM that gives you cash for Bitcoin?
As this article makes very clear, Bitcoin has been a law enforcement honeypot for more than a decade now. Asking if there's a way to use Bitcoin anonymously is like asking about the best way to walk into a police station, steal a computer off a desk, and walk back out the front door. No, man. The question is the answer. It is going to be very difficult to steal things out of a police station, because it is a police station.
"How do I use this law enforcement surveillance network to commit a crime?" Don't!
I mean you can always coinjoin your coins and then use a regulated exchange. They'll be able to tell you used the joiner or tornado but they can't tell where the coins came from. There is also a large is network of people who do meet ups and pay cash for crypto.
Define anonymous, but you could in theory sell your wallet to someone else wholesale and they pay in cash for whatever value of bitcoin is in the wallet.
It's still potentially leaky because you're relianing on the buyer to not get that traced back to you.
I guess like for several security topics: the process to find my identity is too expensive/impractical/takes too much time. I mean, we know it is possible to use brute force to crack encrypted data, it just takes a trillions of years or trillions of dollars so it becomes practically impossible.
I think this is an old nut that's long been cracked, and the answer is no. With Anti-ML and KYC legislation, it's really difficult for any company to act like an unwitting agent, and still have access to financial system.
but fwiw with monero they don't know where the crypto came from. Technically, you could have mined it in the early days. So as long as you have to report on sale only and not origination, everyone can party on
I will (continue to be) cynical. This article and many others recently[1] read like it is targeted at the non-technical general public.
To be more succinct, they read like 'current crypto currency solutions like Bitcoins are all bad, and only used by bad people.' The articles are begging for a savior to step in and provide a solution; maybe the government...
[1] from the same author, but he is not the only one of course:
> Many of the site’s users seemed to be paying the site directly from the addresses where they’d purchased the coins, on exchanges like Coinbase and Circle, based in the United States.
What makes you think the Constitution has anything to say on the matter? I mean, on what basis would you think the FBI is constitutional but the IRS's criminal investigations division isn't?
That's an interesting position you ascribe to me on no evidence whatsoever. If you read the Constitution, there's a body in each state which is supposed to "execute the Laws of the Union", and it's not the FBI either.
Almost immediately after the US Constitution came into effect in 1789, the first federal law enforcement agency, the US Marshals Service, was created. So clearly, the founding generation thought that federal law enforcement was authorized by the Constitution.
Federal law enforcement is clearly justified under the necessary and proper clause. Without federal law enforcement, there is no ability to force states to comply with federal law, which the Constitution clearly requires by 1) explicitly saying that federal law is supreme over state law, and 2) prohibiting various practices by the states. Imagine a federal court having to call upon state police to enforce their subpoenas, subpoenas that may target the people who sign the state polices' checks. Or imagine the Department of Justice having to call upon the state militia to arrest a state's governor for the commission of a federal crime. I think it's pretty obvious that federal law enforcement is "necessary and proper" to the exercise of Congress's enumerated powers. There is no sovereignty without the ability to deploy violence to enforce it.
The thoughts of the founding generation do not determine constitutionality, though with regard to the ratifying conventions they can inform our grasp of contemporary understanding of the document's meaning. In fact, the first few presidential administrations illustrate how fraught was their relation to the constitutional structure.
> Federal law enforcement is clearly justified under the necessary and proper clause.
It doesn't have to be justified in that way, because it's provided for in the document. One of the constitutional powers of Congress is "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." You recommend that I imagine "the Department of Justice having to call upon the state militia to arrest a state's governor"; I have no difficulty doing so. Are there inconveniences attendant on that method of law enforcement? Of course, but my response is twofold: first, it's the "necessary and proper" clause, not the "convenient and desirable" clause. Not everything the federal government might find convenient and desirable lies within their power, because, second, the Constitution was written to make the exercise of federal power inconvenient in cases where it is in conflict with the will of the states.
> There is no sovereignty without the ability to deploy violence to enforce it.
You say this as though sovereignty were a uniquely federal phenomenon. Not only do the states hold a measure of sovereignty, but the ultimate sovereignty in the United States resides in the people, of whose power the state militias were intended to be an instrument. Both these loci of sovereignty are endangered by precisely the distortion of the constitutional order that you approve.
> ... users could obtain points not just by purchasing them but also by uploading videos. ... The page also warned that uploaded videos would be checked for uniqueness; only new material would be accepted—a feature that, to the agents, seemed expressly designed to encourage more abuse of children.
Rewarding for uploads + de-duping is so deeply sinister. This is a game whose primary mechanic was to pay people to go out and actively rape children.
