I honestly don't know how I feel about this. While I obviously do want these cybercriminals to be found and arrested, I have a bad feeling whenever I see the words "Bitcoin" and "tracking" in the same sentence. It only looks like the "let's find a way to identify BTC users" plot thickens every day.
Hyungwoo Kim, CEO of Uppsala Security explained how domestic South Korean money laundering and cyber crime experts still roam free in the country using cryptocurrency.
(..)
Second, he explained that as he helped law enforcement discover the identities of some of the nth-room degenerates through their ETH, BTC, and Monero transactions, (..)
Kim made a straightforward plea to the audience that as cases of cyber crimes via cryptocurrency proliferate and are exposed, countermeasures against them should evolve. (..) His suggestion was to identify criminal wallets and flag them so that they cannot be used in the future.
Fortunately for law enforcement, cryptocurrency cyber crimes are easy to track.
Reading through the lines, my previous statement is further confirmed. So how are we going to
flag criminal wallets so that they cannot be used in the future? Because that's censorship, and Bitcoin is a censorship-free cryptocurrency.
As others have told me in a previous thread of mine about mixers, at one point we will most likely
all own Bitcoins that came from addresses that have been used in criminal activity or in mixers. So are we going to flag
all these addresses? How do you censor a censorship-free system?
I agree that as some point BTC should proliferate in enough hands that almost every wallet could potentially hold some amount of tainted coins. Now i am guessing that it would be practically impossible for any government to blacklist taint every wallet, it would be easier to simply issue an outright ban on the Use of Bitcoin. I think here that these chain analysis companies and law enforcement might than try and target larger wallets for the sake of efficiency or maybe target wallets containing more than a certain threshold of tainted coins say 30-40%.
But i suppose that once we can implement Schnorr and taproot and true privacy into Bitcoin it should become much more difficult for anyone to impose censorship like this into Bitcoin. That being said it would also make it more attractive to cyber criminals which could than be likely to create more government distrust in cryptocurrencies.