Topic: [2017-08-29] Dark web finds bitcoin increasingly more of a problem than a help (Read 11000 times)

This will clean the name of bitcoin. Most people that I know assumes bitcoin is only used in darkweb  and mainly for illegal activities. I hope big fishes are all caught by this and not only the small ones. This news should be spread more to know  how effective it is when it comes to capturing criminals online.

I see what you mean. To clarify my thoughts further: what I mean is that the idea that bad behaviour is seen and punished (in short: bad guys stay away) could be a reason that 'ordinary people' gain trust in this new technology and start to adapt it quicker. You are totally right that there are other aspects involved in this matter that devalue the idea behind Bitcoin. On Changely and Shapeshift, I would like to add that these private companies are free to accept or not accept business. That is without touching the question whether freezing funds indeed occurs at these services and if so, whether that is questionable or not.

This is completely incorrect, unfortunately. The opposite is true.

For money to be trusted, and ultimately valued, people cannot be fearful that some specific tokens within the money supply are subject to non-acceptance or seizure. Having this characteristic devalues the money properties of a given money instrument, and so Shapeshift, Changely and whoever else are working against Bitcoin's wider acceptance (and market value) by behaving in this manner.

Furthermore, Bitcoin's design exacerbates this problem: 2 or more inputs can be combined into a single output in a Bitcoin transaction. That means that blacklisted inputs can be mixed seamlessly with any number of "clean" inputs too. Doing this carefully, those that wish to make blacklisted BTC acceptable can make the job of blacklisting unworkable in practical terms.


The real solution to immoral or criminal acts is rather like that of one's health: prevention > cure.

Loss is a part of life. When you lose something or are violated somehow as a consequence of someone tricking you or taking advantage of your unawareness, it's often best to accept the loss and move on. Learning from one's mistakes (and those of others) seems to be going out of fashion since the 20th century, I expect the age of cryptocracy will re-introduce the school of hard knocks to the coddled middle-classes once again (the working class and modern elite class are much better versed in the realities of anti-social & sociopathic behaviour types, the middle class have been made overgrown schoolchildren by their over-reliance on the state)

I read an article recently that also highlighted the fact that a criminal would be pretty stupid to use Bitcoin as mode of value transfer mechanism for his illegal activities. The open character of the protocol makes it quite easy to retrace transactions on the blockchain. Second, I understand that major coin exchangers (e.g., shapeshift, changely) do not have a problem to hold on to coins obtained from 'blacklisted' bitcoin addresses if the address is suspect to hold illegally obtained funds.

Bitcoin's transparency is one of the features that will help Bitcoin's further acceptance. The idea that criminals evade the use of Bitcoin (because transparent) could give it a further token of legitimacy.

I've learned something today, thak you for this post sir.  okay, this is not spam but i think this post give me something to learn from.  I am advocate of legalization of bitcoin on my country but not on regulation of the Government, this post gave me a notification on what bitcoin really is and it's usage.  Again, Thank you.

Yes, that's it! You don't need no apology, it was good to reflect on your words.
Let me close with:
Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Thank you

Well, I owe you an apology, I was too quick to admonish you in that post, you didn't specifically advocate using the dominant legal system to solve the problem you're seeing.


But maybe I should have said this: be careful what you wish for.

Bitcoin is designed to be unstoppable in various ways, and of course people will use those features to realise their view of what's right and wrong in their eyes.

So if you don't like drug dealers being a part of the investment capital for Bitcoin's exchange rate, you're using the wrong type of money. We, as Bitcoiners, must accept that all classes of moral behaviours will find their economic trading manifested in deals for BTC, it's a feature, not a bug.



The danger to you (and all of us) is that people will classify you and your questionable moral use of Bitcoin as something to target.

Here's an easy one: what if people who missed out on Bitcoin decide that people becoming wealthy is in itself an immoral act, and that you should give it away to those deserving people that don't have any! I mean, you were just lucky! Not to mention greedy...

So, as I said, be careful for what you wish for. "An attack on freedom anywhere is an attack on freedom everywhere". First they came for the drug dealers, etc

Hey Carlton, that's sad coming from you. I value your words a lot and I'm a bit confused.
I didn't wish any violence or theft about no one. I think you misunderstood me.

Edit: think I got your point but I didn't mean it that way.

So finally Governments would no longer stress on Bitcoin being the currency of illegal market. Bitcoin since its inception is carrying the stigma of being a currency of darkweb. Many people tend to avoid Bitcoin for the same. These statistics are indeed great and would help in driving the growth in demand. Also, now Government can think positively about Bitcoin as the major reason for banning Bitcoin is reducing sharply.

You are aware that the TOR browser may not be as anonymous as you think? There are rumours and reports that several intelligence services over the world
(e.g. the CIA) are operating a non-negligible percentage of the entry nodes of the TOR network. By doing this they can identify the
real IP address of a certain percentage of TOR users.

Of course TOR is still more secure than regular browsers, but 100 % anonymity isn´t possible with TOR either!

You've got no clue what Bitcoin is really about


Bitcoin is designed to allow people to choose what they do with their money, free from morality (which is different depending on the person), and free from violent organisations that impose choices on you.


You don't belong here, and don't deserve to have gained from the rises in Bitcoin's value. You are wishing violence and theft on people that have not harmed you at all, and are likley harming only themselves (and, in many cases, simply enjoying themselves).

You should be ashamed of yourselves

Exactly, now Bitcoin's reputation will be better as the time goes by, without linking it to illegal activities may give bitcoin's a chance to globalize it's popularity and make casual users attracted to it, which will made a rise on bitcoin users.

Don't forget that criminals using deep web don't use their local IP,they use Tor browser which makes them totally anonymous by having a strong proxy system and features like disabling Java/malicious ads/files/cookies/Html5 etc...
In other words if criminals use mixing services even if the government seize the servers they won't be able to track the criminal if he used Tor browser to use the mixer service.

However it was obvious that they will switch to another cryptocurrency more  anonymous than Bitcoin and less fee consuming.This may be a good thing since Bitcoin need government support,not criminals support.

I agree to this, as of now bitcoin cannot provide privacy as much as monero , but as for the upcoming updates i think this will be fixed and will be upgraded to provide a better privacy.

High fees certainly play a major role in this whole matter but that is true for the market at large. Either way, the more bitcoins leave the Dark Web the better it will be for the overall reputation of this ecosystem. A lot of money is flowing into bitcoin right now and I prefer they will go to investors instead of drug dealers.

I want high prices not "high" people

I believe it's not only the fact that it can be tracked by every node. The high fee factor and due to this big portion of transactions moves to other altcoins and that's not only case for dark web but for normal merchants also.

This is somehow good to reputation of Bitcoin as other saw that Bitcoin is used in illegal activity especially on Darkwebs.  Now that lots of users found Bitcoin to be traceable if they happen to link their  identity to it such as an online exchange or some entrapment is done when bitcoin conversion is done thru in person trade.  It would be great that the mark of being used in illegal activity is clear out of Bitcoin for mainstream adoption.

All kinds of upgrades are possible with segwit script versioning, a big one is privacy improvements. 

Are you delusional?  We're talking about a large amount of people at real merchants paying with BTC, and they're complaining about BTC because it's not working well as a monetary system.

Somehow you're trying to argue that a large number of customers disliking BTC as a payment system would make it a better payment system.  With good money, people can do what they want, which is why physical cash is used so much for crime.

Last time I checked though, BTC is still used for the majority of darknet transactions.  I had a look at Alpha Bay a couple of months before it closed down out of curiosity, and most of the offers there were from people only accepting Bitcoin (although Alpha Bay had wallets for ETH, Monero and ZCash as well).

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On first sight you'd think that CNBC actually knows what they're talking about.  Here are a couple of glaringly obvious errors in their article:
They imply that cryptocurrencies have "representatives" as if there's just one team that you can contact.  On the video, it just says that "Monero" didn't respond to their queries.
Bitcoin does not show the name of anyone.  What they mean is that it shows is a pseudonym called an address, which is far away from showing anyone's actual name.  Sure, people can often be traced, but BTC doesn't just reveal that information.

Agree, Monero offers more anonymity as compared to bitcoin. Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous and everything can be track in blockchain, although a mixing services can be used, still its very easy for government to seize the server and get all the necessary logs like I.P. address and relevant info.

Monero on the other hand is different because every transaction is always private. hide where the money comes from. Spent inputs in a transaction are hidden among several others that also appear to be spent. Thus, no one knows which source of money is actually being spent. So if I'm a criminal I would rather use Monero than bitcoin.