- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
The group responsible is “Collective Shout”, the same org has targeted Steam before.
There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.
Elaborate please.
Except Monero and a few exceptions, AML and KYC checks are everywhere. Tainted coins and shit.
Crypto goes somewhere that they don’t like? Crypto is seized when it reaches an exchange and they ask for ID and source of funds
I don’t understand. Lets say I have a normal bank card, I paid taxes for all the money I got there. Sometimes I buy crypto using p2p on some platform using this card. I trade this crypto with some other crypto on the same platform. Periodically I send crypto to my personal wallet from there. From my personal wallet I buy porn games for example. At which point someone comes in and seizes anything?
They would not, but you would not be anonymous this way. You get problems when:
As long as you stay with centralized exchanges and directly send crypto to some websites, you should in theory always be fine (as long as you don’t send them to criminal or pro-privacy services), but that’s not the original goal of crypto
Apart from that, some countries straight up force you to declare every transaction you make with crypto, which isn’t doable for most people and puts them in illegality
You don’t have to send crypto from exchange directly to websites. You can send it to your external wallet (outside of any platform), and spend from there. And no one’s ever going to be able to prove that wallet belongs to you.
It’s basically the same as directly sending
The exchange will know what you spend crypto on
No, they don’t know who that wallet belongs to and even though they may hypothesize its yours they don’t have any way to prove it. Moreover, anyone, including sellers can use unlimited amount of wallets and register them at rate 1000x faster than even the advanced CIA group would be able to tie even a single address to a particular person/company. So if Steam operated in crypto, it would take days/weeks of some of the most advanced feds in the world to try to prove that you bought something from Steam using your crypto. And they might even fail at that if you or Steam’s wallet are handled carefully, and they wouldn’t even know what exactly you bought.
Following crypto trails is easy when there’s only one destination…
You’re putting too much trust in the system. If there’s a doubt you will be asked to clear it, they won’t do it for you
Who is gonna ask? It is not your bank account, there are no rules where you send your crypto and you don’t have to explain to anyone. And there are no ways to enforce any of this. Also, a lot of crypto payment services and exchanges automatically generate unique intermediate wallets for every transaction. There is a technique to wallet management called “Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HD Wallet)” which seems to be golden standard nowadays, not only it makes it hard to compute your total balance, it also makes it easier to achieve “public address changes with every transaction”. So this is what most exchanges use for those intermediate addresses I assume.
Also, do you realize that even if all exchanges are taken down, this doesn’t in any way harm crypto in general or any of your independent wallets? I mean, you should only look at exchanges as places to input and forex trade crypto, but you should always output it to your external wallets in the end for long-term storage. If some day some exchange suddenly asks any of its users to explain why they did send money to a certain address, that would be the death of this exchange. You don’t need to explain, it is not bank, there are no taxes to pay (you already paid all the taxes before you converted your money to crypto), there are no laws that could make this demand legal. Move to the next exchange.
They don’t need to, crypto is already heavily regulated. If you’ve been alive at all in the past decade, you know this.
Nearly every cryptocurrency (aside from like Monero), is a literal open, transparent ledger that anyone can (and do) view and analyze.
It’s not anonymous at all.
Look, when you use some platform with KYC, they indeed can tie that id information you give them to your internal addresses you use on the same platform. But the moment you send it to your external wallet that link is lost. They can see the transaction but they don’t know and can’t check if that destination address belongs to you, or it’s a person who sold you something, or it’s your friend/relative, or someone you donated to, etc.
This is naive and incorrect. There is a reason why darknet markets these days only deal in Monero, for the most part.
I’m not saying it’s trivial, but there are literally corporations dedicated to analyzing block chains for law enforcement. It’s an entire industry.
yes, even without KYC, one opsec fail and they can get quite a info on you, things like usage patterns and eventually potentially a profile, upon which will probablycreate a “credit score” of sorts and probably sell advertising data too because why not!?
Okay, how exactly will this allow to ban selling legal porn games via blockchain? Because this is what is happening with payment processors.
Then explain how exactly is this incorrect. If you buy and smuggle weapons for example, feds do undercover operation and pretend to sell guns, they set their own wallet, they track transactions, they co-operate with exchanges and have access to KYC data, they see you sent from exchange to wallet X, and then wallet X payed for weapons to their undercover wallet Y. What they achieve here is: they just see there is some chance that wallet X also belongs to you and maybe it’s you who are buying those weapons, but they can’t use this as proof of anything, what they can do is start spying on you from other vectors: your regular bank accounts, your social media, or even IRL to check if they can find any real evidence. That’s basically all. This is not at all a concern for people who don’t run international multibillion crime syndicates, etc. And also this all is extremely irrelevant to original topic. Because those games aren’t even illegal, it’s basically just a fkin preference of payment processors to demand Steam and Itch to take them down. If Steam operated in crypto, no amount of transaction tracking would make it possible to enforce something like this, because this is not law enforcement to begin with, it’s not illegal games and they are not taken down due to any legal concerns.