Topic: Public Blockchain Analysis Sites (to check transaction history) (Read 411 times)

But I know where it's from and I can rule it out by doing so.
Of course, criminals abusing any services is a different issue.
Criminals should be well aware that Bitcoin is public and not suited for their BS.


Well, that's a great example, sabotaging Bitcoin would be a very illegimate purpose. At least I wouldn't be the one supporting it. And I believe, it should be up to the individual to make such a decision.
And, important point:
This famous fungibility only means: coins can be sent by ourselves, it's a technical thing.
It doesn't mean that everyone is forced to accept them and not allowed to do research.


Maybe it's a bit different because I believe it's a very legitimate concern for a face to face trade. There, 2 people meet anonymously in public, they don't know each other. It's sometimes very shady business.
It really depends on each case and should be rated case to case. 

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No, I don't ask because (most) supermarkets are pretty legitimate. And most money is scanned regularly to avoid fake cash.
This cash and Bitcoin comparison doesn't make any sense because cash can't be linked but Bitcoin transaction can because it is digital and public. Bitcoin is a public ledger.
This is a fundamental difference.




Because Blockchain is public. Cash / jewellery etc is not. And I like it how it is.
If someone doesn't like that fact, that the Bitcoin Blockchain is public, they can use Monero...

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However, many thanks for your input @everyone even after this post went off-topic. Initially I just wanted to collect sites like oxt.me because we have so many Blockexplorers.
My intention was not to dive into pro / con arguments, or best practices for face to face P2P / purchases.
I'll lock this topic, many thanks for the input everyone. 
Have a nice day. 

When you go to the groceries and pay with cash and get the change, do you ask the seller where they got the change from?

When you buy jewelery, do you also care about the origins of what you buy, or only about the materials that are used and the jewel itself? I guess the latter. In bitcoin, the "material" is protected by bitcoin itself, assuming there are enough confirmations in the network. So, why bother about the former?

If I get any amount of Bitcoin, I just do some coinjoins and then, everything works perfectly!

If you don't know your coins' history, you don't know that either.

In my opinion, it doesn't. I don't care if your friend has ethical concerns with the coins they receive, or if they want to sabotage Bitcoin. The result is the same. In either case, they treat the currency as non-fungible, which ultimately does the same harm.

Lol. Since when do we request this sort of information? It's the first time I've ever heard this as a need. Not caring about the history of my coins has worked fine so far.

I must have received plenty of bitcoin which were involved in some illegal activity. I share no concern, just as I share none with the cash I spend everyday. The public availability and interconnectedness of transactions does not imply that I am correlated with the financial history of my coins.

Yes, we don't know but to have another "part of the puzzle" can help us to find it out. Because when meeting a stranger, every point is important to evaluate. And if he's selling Bitcoin outright from a hack or stolen BTC, we can conclude for sure that the seller is not innocent.
We have had such a story just recently on our local board, where someone's wallet was hacked. And unfortunately, P2P is well suited for hackers to get rid of their stolen or hacked BTC.


Of course I don't know but I'm sure no one of my coins is from an outright hack.


But it's beneficial for the buyer. If he's feeling safer to get more trust, this could be helpful for the face-to-face meeting.

Of course, everyone can decide if / under which conditions to sell or not.


But he doesn't want to "spy", he just want to find out if his trading partner is trying to sell him hacked our stolen coins or not.


But that's also some effort and requires a fee.
However, I believe P2P is still a very important market but due to the crime, I can well understand the buyer's concern.

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Sorry, but that take is straight out bullshit.

Of course, intention does matter. If a legitimate buyer wants to purchase Bitcoin legitimately, what he'll receive anyways, of course he is entitled to request this sort of information.
And of course, a potential seller could deny him such sort of information. But maybe why he could deny it? Maybe he's a hacker and a criminal who's trying to get rid of stolen and hacked coins? In our local board, someone got hacked recently (yes, it's his fault) but of course, it's legitimate that buyers don't want to get dumped with such stolen or hacked coins. Blockchain is public and that's simply how Bitcoin works.

Blaming me, that I would "do harm" just by using the Blockchain, how it is designed, is not doing any harm to anyone.  

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But thanks for the input everyone, the topic wasn't intended to lead to a discussion of "best face to face P2P practices 101".  
I just wanted to see if there are similar sites like oxt.me.  

It is absolutely subjective, as I've talked about before:


Even Chainalysis themselves admit that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence underpinning any of their blockchain analysis bullshit: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.62875591

The satoshi is just a satoshi. It is not anything else. If some centralized entity decides that they don't want to accept that satoshi, fine. Their loss. It makes absolutely zero different to me owning that satoshi or spending that satoshi with entities which are not anti-bitcoin.

They are partly succeeding only because they are convincing people like 1miau's friend that taint isn't made up bullshit and that he needs to spy on any coins he's buying.

Worse than that. Coins from hacks and scams have 100% passed through the hot wallets of Binance, Coinbase, and every other major exchange in existence. By the exact same logic that say mixed coins are tainted, then any and all coins withdrawn from a centralized exchange are also tainted. In fact, pretty much every bitcoin in active circulation is tainted. And as my little experiment above shows, coins from one centralized exchange may not necessarily be accepted by another centralized exchange.

The more we accept this bullshit and modify our behavior to comply with it, the more strength we give it and the more we weaken bitcoin as a currency and as a concept.

"Taint" is like a religion: it only exists if people believe it exists. If you can't accept cash money without doing a background check, money loses it's value. The same will happen to Bitcoin, and that is the real danger.

Governments can't stop Bitcoin, but they can make people believe they shouldn't trust Bitcoin. That's the real danger, and that's what I indeed have a strong opinion against.

It's worse with the companies promoting the idea of taint: they made a business model out of telling people some Bitcoins are worth less than others. They're not sharing their list, just like governments don't just publish a list of "tainted" Bitcoins. And any Bitcoin you own already can be labeled at "tainted" later on by random people for arbitrary reasons. The whole concept shouldn't exist.

The intentions really don't matter. If you don't treat bitcoin as fungible currency that it is, you're doing equal harm, regardless of intentions.

Treating every mixed coin as "tainted" merely based on the certainty that some of them might have originated from illegal activities does not qualify as a reasonably established practice. It's simply put, insane. You wouldn't treat a $10 bill as tainted if there was 50% chance it was used illegally. Every dollar bill is potentially used illegally, just as every mixed bitcoin.

But, more than that are claimed to be "tainted". Every single coin which passes a mixer or is coinjoined is deemed as tainted, because a fraction of the input is involved in illegal activity. You can't seriously argue that mixed coins being reasonably called tainted is based on facts, because it is half insane and half guesswork.

Ideally it would be fungible.
Right now some governments are trying their hardest to not have it that way. And are partly succeeding.

If your comment is meant in the way, that blockchain-analytics tools should not be shared, because it goes against the intention of Bitcoin, I have to disagree.
Why? Because any powerful instituation is already capable enough to do these analysis and has all the necessary tools at their disposal. Which means open tools that have similar capabilites will only empower "the people" - they can check any possible leaks / security concerns of their own transactions and take measurements accordingly.

I know you have strong opinions on the topic, but just claiming Bitcoin is fungible when it is clearly not (right now) is imho dangerous. It may lead to Bitcoin-users mistakenly assuming anonymity when it is not necessarily there.

I'll show you something even worse than that and that is your bank account balance.

You got no way to check whether the bank is using the money in your and other people's accounts to help people do money laundering in return for a fat paycheck.

Although to the government's credit, they know that investigating people solely because the money that they withdrew from the bank has traces of bank-sanctioned money laundering is a waste of time because it was not their fault to begin with.

A practical solution for you as a user, yes. But a solution from the perspective that "each Satoshi has a history and therefore a context", no. We need different layers of methods as a solution. Perhaps, Lightning + Mixers + CoinJoins?


From the viewpoint of the network, "taint" doesn't exist. But in real world, because the blockchain is transparent, then our UTXO history could be studied, analyzed, and "labeled". You could argue that it's subjective, but some of their history in the blockchain are based on facts. If a Satoshi actually went through an address that's verified active in the Dark Markets, then those UTXOs are "tainted".

That's kind of my point. Looking at the history of the coins being sold doesn't tell you anything about the person selling them.

Do you know the history of every satoshi you own? I very much doubt anyone knows this.

Yes, but that's different. If someone is trading with me, then of course they will see the address I sent coins from (although those coins will be either mixed or coinjoined, so they will learn nothing anyway). But someone who I might not be trading with asking me to reveal to them my address(es) so they can perform some kind of rudimentary blockchain analysis on them and then maybe not trade with me at all? I've just lost some privacy for absolutely no benefit to me. So I would pass and find a different buyer.

But that's exactly what it is. He wants to spy on the coins he is going to receive to see if they are "good enough" for him.

If you are that worried about the history of coins you buy P2P, then just mix or coinjoin everything you receive. Simple.

Well, we don't know if it's a scammer / Darknet dealer / criminal or even a hacker himself who's going to sell it instead of an innocent person.
We just don't know it - until we meet.  

No doubt, there are different "tiers of tainted".  


Because he's owner of the coins.
If he doesn't know, what happened before to these (if he's honest), it's also helpful for the seller. (and even then, the buyer could try to look it up via oxt.me (or similar).


It shouldn't be any issue because if purchased, the buyer could "spy"* as well, because he'll get to know the address anyways.

* I wouldn't  call it "spying", "spying" sounds more like with bad intentions, while the buyer can be 100% friendly, without any sinister intent.


If it's agreed to in the deal, a breach would certainly lead to "a negative trust" (to talk with Bitcointalk.org terms).  
And I mean face to face P2P, meet in real life (anonymous) and make a trade, which he wanted to do.  
Maybe this important part got unnoticed (or I've not mentionet it clearly enough).

The history of the coins being sold is not correlated with the legitimacy of the seller. As I said, I'm certain I've bought and sold plenty of coins which would be classed as "tainted", but I have never scammed anyone.

Why would the seller even know the history of the coins being sold? I don't know the history of any of my coins, nor do I care.

If I was doing a trade and the other party said "Send me your address/UTXO before we trade so I can spy on your coins", I'd simply end the chat and find another person to trade with.

Then he will be at fault for failing to complete the trade. He'll either lose his security deposit or be banned from the platform, depending on the P2P platform being used.

Great list, I'll check out each one when I've some more time.  

Yes, account requirement is very unfortunate and some even seem to be very hard to access (pay?) but it's still great to have a list from various sites.
+1
 

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Yes, a simple Blockexplorer doesn't help much here, especially for Newbies.
That's why I'm searching a site like oxt.me (or even better), where also a Newbie can make a check.

He was just planning to look up, if it's a legit seller or if the seller lied to him.
Because if the seller lied, it's a big red flag.

That's no issue because from what I've read, the buyer was going to request which UTXO's are for sale (or at least from which address it's coming from), the seller sends his address, where the BTC is coming from and then, he (the buyer) could check on his own if he wants to make a purchase or not.
By doing so, he would ask the buyer, where the BTC is from. Then, the seller tells him and the buyer could look up (by receiving the public address), if the seller has lied to him (by verifying it on the Blockchain).
It's a great strategy in my opinion because if the seller is not a legitimate one or has something to hide, the buyer could catch him lying and avoid him for a deal.

If he's getting other BTC than previously agreed to, then he could refuse to pay.
Of course, all details need to be agreed in advance.  

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Investigating UTXOs is in his best interest and I definitely trust him (the buyer), that he's not a criminal.
He seemed very legitimate.
Of course I've not asked him what he's planning to do with his purchased Bitcoin, as it's not really my business.
He seemed legitimate and just wanted to make sure that he's not getting ripped off by a Darknet dealer.

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Well, cash is not based on a public Blockchain.  
That's a big difference and we all know these shady Darknet criminals who are trying to rip off inexperienced people with any sort of bullshit. Trying to get rid of stolen or hacked coins is definitely an issue and Newbies are an easy target. Unfortunately, P2P is very affected by shady actors and that's really sad because P2P is very important in my opinion.

After all, I believe that these sites should be accessible to anyone because such information is public anyways. It's just a cash grab.
Hopefully, some sites will remove their access restrictions and then, the remaining, restricted sites can see how it goes...  
It's like paying for a Blockexplorer, 100% bullshit.

Yeah, I hope this will get more common for known exchange addresses. When someone claims "hey my BTC is from Binance", we could easily check it ourselves.

"Taint" is subjective. The objective viewpoint is to treat every coin equally, just as you would with cash. The ledger provides coin history, but beyond that it's utter guesswork to determine who owns it, what was exchanged etc. But, deeming mixed coins as "tainted", which is known practice by Coinbase, is insane. You cannot even argue the coins have "bad history", because it is completely erased in the first place. Mixed coins are indistinguishable; deeming them "bad", just because there is an x probability of being owned by a criminal is insane.

Solution: Don't use Coinbase! Aside from being anti-bitcoin, anti-privacy, anti-fungibility, and pro-censorship, they are deeply unethical, support attacks on bitcoin, sell your data, report you to your government, work with a variety of government agencies, insider trade against you, employ literal human rights' abusers, and will arbitrarily freeze your account and seize your coins with no warning and no recourse. Why anyone would voluntarily use them is far beyond me.

Taint from Coinbase's view is real. Don't use Coinbase and whatever they classify as tainted does not matter to you in the slightest. I have a bunch of coins which I'm sure various centralized exchanges would class as tainted, but I don't give it a moment's thought and it doesn't affect me in the slightest because I choose not to support such anti-bitcoin and anti-freedom businesses. There are more privacy respecting alternatives available than ever before.

OP, this explorer could be a good addition for your research, https://explorer.crystalblockchain.com/


Although "taint" from the network's viewpoint DOES NOT exist, I believe such arguments in your post are in denial of what could actually happen to you in practice. Try making a deposit in Coinbase with UTXOs you received from a Dark Market user. Therefore "taint" from the real world's viewpoint is real, and because Bitcoin is easy to track, each Satoshi has a "history" and a "context" because any entity can put "taint" labels in them.

Seriously, since when do we have to investigate the past of our coins/money? Should I buy a dog and hire a dog trainer to check absolutely every banknote that I receive, whether does it has traces of cocaine or not? Since when did that become my duty or anyone's duty? That makes no sense. When I receive cash, that cash can be used by top criminals but does that mean that if there is a trace of their fingerprint on my cash it should get confiscated, I should be left without money and face a jail? C'mon guys.

To be honest, paid blockchain analyses have serious problems too and they don't function properly. And I bet none crypto related company will ban you if you receive coins from someone who has mixed it or has done some small shit, even if that's the case. By the way, if you type wallet address on Blockchain.com, you'll see that some of them are tagged with a name, i.e. wallet X belongs to Mt. Gox.

This is actually the best response here!

I don't see how using block explorer websites is going to help here. Is he going to ask the seller to identify the specific UTXOs they are going to trade with prior to the trade? And then what happens if the seller uses other UTXOs instead? He's not going to be able to reverse the trade because he doesn't like where those UTXOs come from.

I would also say that I have traded bitcoin peer to peer, a lot, and never once cared in the slightest where the bitcoin I am buying comes from, just as I do not care in the slightest where the cash I receive comes from. I'm not going to spend my cash anywhere that looks at the serial numbers of the bills and decides to refuse my cash because it was once used to commit a crime, and I'm not going to spend my bitcoin anywhere that looks at the on chain history of that bitcoin and decides to refuse it.

The solution to your friend's problem is not to start attempting to investigate specific UTXOs before he has even bought them. The solution is to identify why he wants to do this and which services he is using which are placing artificial and arbitrary restrictions on his coins, and find and use alternatives instead. Alternatively, everything he buys P2P goes straight in to Whirlpool or JoinMarket to completely obfuscate its history.

Hi guys. Without spoiling the discussion, let me share my personal view on the subject.

I dislike companies that do analysis on the Bitcoin's blockchain. I don't use them for any reason. I just run my own mempool instance on top of my node and I use this to "check" where my funds come from.

Instead of trying to verify whether my P2P's funds origins are trustworthy, I follow these steps:

Let's say I receive UTXO A from someone.

1. I have a hot wallet dedicated to bitcoin mixing and coinjoins.
2. The UTXO A does several coinjoins. The piece of the UTXO that remains non-coinjoined, I just sell it for FIAT.
3. I would never mix UTXO A with another UTXO from other source.
4. Once I get multiple mixes I send the UTXOs that are created to separate addresses.

The reason I say this, is that I believe this makes Chain Analysis a bit harder. (And I like that  )