Topic: Antinalysis - free tool to check the dirtyness of bitcoin address (Read 510 times)

Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Given that we know centralized exchanges, which are heavily regulated, do everything from accepting bribes to list shitcoins, insider trade, illegally sell your data, and more, then it is entirely reasonable to suspect that blockchain analysis companies which are barely regulated at all accept bribes/money/favors to magically erase the taint on some coins. Or maybe the US government pay to have the coins of various Russia oligarchs tainted. Or maybe you've said some anti-government things online - nothing illegal, but suddenly you find your wallets on a blacklist somewhere. What a coincidence!

If you are good friend with CZ I am sure that he can make your ''taint'' clean with a simple click of a button, that is how their bias analytics really work.
I can understand why someone wants to stop hackers and people who stole bitcoins, but there are much better way than doing this.
Just imagine rouge employee of chainalysis manually flagging any address he wants, or making some unintentional mistake that could ruin lives.

You probably sent coins from your address to Binance exchange, this is similar result that I got with random address I was testing there was 25% ofac sanctions blacklist connected with Binance.
Their main hot wallet have similar results with Antinalysis website.

And how many exchanges or blockchain analysis companies do you think are doing that for the average user who is depositing amounts less than 1 BTC? Maybe in Draper's case when they are dealing with ~30,000 BTC then it becomes worth their time for someone to sit down and manually check things (especially when it is so easily identified as in Draper's case), but for the average user with small amounts of funds from a variety or sources which flag up with a variety of taint reasons, then it is absolutely not worth their time. Why spend their own money to look in to when they can just lock the account and demand ridiculous amounts of KYC instead?

Maybe you know otherwise, but I am unaware of literally any successful cases by an individual user against a major exchange which locked their account or seized their coins.

Tainting addresses in any manner makes no sense. As soon as a transaction, any transaction, has taken place, then you cannot say that those coins have not changed hands in a perfectly legal manner, such as buying goods from another person or being sold peer to peer. If we applied this taint nonsense to fiat, then every single coin or bill in circulation would be tainted.

All the more reason for people to ignore taint and stop supporting exchanges like Binance which implement it.

In my test of two separate addresses (unrelated to each other) that were both funded with only one transaction from the Binance hot wallet, I got the same results. Therefore, it appears the tool does make a bit of sense.



However, I am not sure if tainting addresses in that manner makes much sense. According to this, all addresses that have ever received coins from the Binance exchange will be associated with suspicious and illegal activities.

Mine was just the campaign. From what I could see so was the other, but since it's not mine and I did not look at EVERY input I can't be sure.
BUT and let me be clear, mine was the 'dirty' one the other was clean. So unless they had a few $0 payment weeks and those weeks happened to be the ones with 'dirty' coins then it's all BS

-Dave

When Tim Draper, for example, bought the seized coin from Silk Road, any automated "taint analysis" would show 100% of the coin came from a darknet market.

The above is one example of why any "taint analysis" should include individual judgment as to if a particular deposit should be accepted or not. I cannot speak to why exchanges may block any particular account, however, I would note that exchanges have a clear incentive against blocking accounts for arbitrary reasons. I would also note that a customer can bring legal action against an exchange if the exchange disallows withdrawals.

Were both addresses used only for receiving campaign payments, or were there coins from other sources too?

Which makes you wonder which exchanges or blockchain analysis companies are employing the same (or some of the same) methods which are being utilized here. If it is so completely arbitrary/random, then it just lends more weight to what I've always said: Taint is completely meaningless bullshit.

Or it's just spewing random garbage.
I went to the chipmixer campaign spreadsheet for week 231 and pulled 2 addresses.
1 was mine the other was someone else.
Got 2 totally different things as to the source of the funds. To the extent that it only popped as coming from an exchange for the other address.

-Dave

That is maybe true for the odd deposit here or there, but the two addresses I checked above have somewhere approaching 25% of their funds coming from known hacks, known scams, on blacklists, known darknet markets, etc. These are addresses which have processed tens or even hundreds of thousands of bitcoin. This pattern is repeated across a number of other exchange addresses I pulled from https://www.walletexplorer.com/

There is obviously a long standing pattern of exchanges being very inconsistent as to what they consider tainted and what they consider clean, and every exchange will have their own metrics. This means that coins you think are clean may still be treated as tainted by some exchanges but not others, and coins you withdraw from some exchanges may not be clean in the eyes of other exchanges.

As I've said many times, taint is completely arbitrary and completely meaningless, and we should, as a community, stop supporting centralized exchanges which enforce this complete nonsense.

It appears they are claiming their tool is for individual users, but I see no reason why an individual user would ever want to use this kind of tool (other than entertainment purposes).

In general, it should not be a surprise to you if you have coin that is associated with criminal activity (or from an exchange or a miner).

This is not necessarily true.

A potential criminal could deposit their coin today, and tomorrow, it could be alledged that the particular coin deposited was associated with criminal activity. Binance could accept the deposit because they would have no way of knowing about the alleged theft, while a chain analysis company, looking at the transaction months (or later) after the fact might know about the alleged theft.

There's already a thread about their services, but it's under a different name: [2021-14-08] Elliptic discovers site that checks how "clean" digital coins are
^{- Back then, you had to pay roughly $3 for a single lookup!}

I got a significantly different result on each of these services ^{[not sure which one is more accurate since they're no longer using AMLBot's API]}.

Right. However, if you are paying for something, that in no way guarantees you are not being used or seen as a product. After all, the idea of having an additional source of income by secretly selling all your data may seem very tempting to them.

Our interests do not coincide with the interests of centralized exchanges, so it is useless to convince them of something. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." As users who understand and respect the core principles of Bitcoin, we want to build a circular bitcoin economy in which the stupid, ineffective, obsolete laws of fiat currencies don't work or are ignored. This economy is open for everyone to join, with whatever coins they have. Exchanges, on the other hand, try to build their own version of the economy - a closed, isolated economy, which would be open only to those with documents and bank accounts. This type of bitcoin economy would allow only "clean" coins transfers between "trusted" third-party services that are KYC/AML compliant and loyal to regulators.

So, instead of fighting exchanges and trying to get them to understand the principles we are fighting for, we should be building an independent economy that will never touch the fiat world again. The tools like Antinalysis and others can be useful for those who, for some reason, aren't yet ready for a circular bitcoin economy but who, at the same time, want to be kind of protected from harsh laws of the fiat world that may lock them up inside isolated system of KYCed.

Nice post OP and o_e_l_e_o for pointing out it's not actually a new script, just another iteration... is it as close enough version of AMLBot as well? The latter is something I've been following for a while, but my impressions of it in 2020 was that it wasn't good enough -- though skimming through it now I see it's truly grown to cover a lot of chains.

Given that this service has previously provided lists of addresses to blockchain analysis companies and government agencies as I linked to above, then perhaps this isn't a super helpful thing to be doing.

Doesn't really matter. If coins from exchanges are one these blacklists, and other exchanges are enforcing these blacklists, then it means your so called "clean" coins withdrawn from centralized exchanges can in fact still be "tainted".

As the saying goes - "If you are getting something for free, then you are the product."

Absolutely, which is just yet more proof that "taint" is completely meaningless. People on this forum regularly tell people to stick to big exchanges like Binance and never to use peer to peer trading, coinjoins, mixers, etc. for fear of receiving tainted coins, and yet, Binance regularly accepts coins related to illicit activities and then sends those same coins out to other users. And as this service shows, just because the coin was deposited to Binance doesn't mean that any other exchange won't still class those coins as tainted.

Could this be one of the reasons why Binance has recently been kissing asses of regulators more than usual, they are even going one step further to comply with something that nobody asked them to do?
I would like to hear more from developers of Antinalysis website so they can clarify better how they are making their reports and what's tolerable percentage of mistakes.
It's not a big surprise when we know that many scammers used Binance exchange for washing their coins from hacks and fake giveaways.[/list]

For starters you hit them where it hurts, their revenue. Start campaigns against centralized exchanges that are forcing this ridiculous trend of "blocking accounts of because of taint" thing to either get them to stop doing it (hence cutting off the taint service revenue) or creating the incentive for other exchanges to be created that don't use taint-service to attract the first exchange's customers hence hitting both service's revenues.

It has happened multiple times in the past, the most recent case is Binance. It didn't become a big exchange because it was a good one! It became big because the 2 big altcoin exchanges at the time (Bittrex and Poloniex) were both having a lot of problems and were intensely enforcing KYC among other scams they pulled. So people needed an alternative and Binance capitalized on that by not doing the same things (at first).

The question I like to ponder about is why would a business that is offering some service to earn money offers it for free...

I got similar results in signature campaign addresses from random forum members, just to test.

I believe those "sanctions blacklist' could possibly include legit casinos and mixer services. They are not necessarily scams.

I believe in future we all need to be more careful about our addresses and from which addresses we are going to spend our bitcoins, specially if we use centralized exchanges.

So out of interest, I put in Binance's hot wallet address - 1NDyJtNTjmwk5xPNhjgAMu4HDHigtobu1s

It stands to reason that anyone who withdraws coins from Binance, and therefore from this address, will receive coins which have the exact same "taint" as coins currently in this address. The breakdown is as follows:

• 50% exchanges - other Binance addresses, presumably their cold wallets
• 25% unknown miner - presumably Binance pool
• 25% ofac sanctions blacklist

I did the same with one of Bittrex's current hot wallet addresses - 1MTwuZHvpmfu3Mupff8Ysomwuqm7rVaUgQ

Much larger spread in this case, most coming from other exchanges and a couple of mining pools, but also a significant minority coming from known scams, known hacks, and two different blacklists.

This raises two points. Obviously whatever mechanism this site is using to assign "taint" is different to what exchanges are using, otherwise these "tainted" coins wouldn't have ended up in exchange's hot wallets in the first place. And secondly, just because your coins came from a centralized exchange does not mean they are clean or free from taint, and another exchange might very well still discriminate against you and your coins.

This is not directed at you, but rather in general, but I have never understood this mentality of "We must bend over backwards and give up every shred of privacy to make sure these exchanges will continue to serve us", whereas any rational person would just say "Well, don't use exchanges which will steal your coins".

Unlike bitcoin maximalists, who are advocating for bitcoin fungibility, or staunch supporters of privacy, freedom, and self-sovereignty, AML compliant centralized services don't care about all these things because their revenue depends on how well they are flirting with regulators. And for a regular user, who already has given up his privacy by undergoing a full process of identity verification on a centralized exchange, it does make sense to check his bitcoin address for AML risk before depositing on the given exchange to avoid or minimize chances of getting blocked or frozen. For those users who haven't yet undergone KYC, it is even more useful since it can protect them from being asked by an exchange to give up their privacy.

Seriously, what do you mean by "fight?" How are we supposed to fight them without even mentioning them or discussing them? I agree with you: one bitcoin always equals another bitcoin, and the traceability of bitcoin transactions shouldn't in any way affect its other important monetary characteristics that make it better money. The thing is that despite the alignment of our views regarding the fungibility of bitcoin, the problem remains; you can't solve it just by never talking about it. You also can't solve it by silencing others.

This service may well be a honeypot to collect user data. We can't verify it is not. But it is always better to have a free alternative to paid services that are definitely known to have been collecting and sharing data with authorities.

I honestly don't see how such a tool is useful at all for regular users.
For starters it is a bad trend that has been going on saying there is such a thing as "dirty bitcoins". If anything we should fight such services instead of advertising them.
Besides as Leo mentioned these tools are more like honeypots created to gather information not to help users. They are building a database of bitcoiners, their addresses and IPs. This could be used to further deanonymize users when combined with other information such as the spy nodes that track IPs and transactions on bitcoin network.