Topic: Swedish ASIC miner company kncminer.com - page 1791. (Read 3049501 times)

Perhaps a better example is in order.

Imagine you are a meth dealer from new mexico. You have $250,000 cash. You use that cash to buy mining equipment, which earns you $250,000 worth of bitcoins.

Can you now go to a car dealership and buy a new ford mustang? Can you buy a house? No, because now instead of being a meth dealer with $250,000 cash, you are a meth dealer with $250,000 of bitcoins. I don't see any problems solved here, except for the fact that the bitcoins are a lot harder to take away.

Oh and I don't think the police would bother with IP addresses and the like, they will just catch you selling meth, see that you had no legal source of money to buy the mining equipment, and take that, and anything you would have bought with the bitcoins.

"clean coins" comes from mining.

Since when is mining not a "valid, legal source"?

Actually - I was only thinking about someone who wanted to buy illegal stuff.  So, if you want to buy something off silkroad, or donate to wikileaks and don't want any way for the coins to be traced back to you.  

However, you got coins buy selling something illegal, and don't want to see those coins used to find out who you are (by loading them into MtGox, for example) then you could buy a miner and then use the miner to generate clean coins.

I hadn't thought about that "use case" until just now.

And yeah, it's true you wouldn't have an explanation for how you were able to afford the miner,  And if the government was investigating you they could go to the mining company and ask for the TXID used to purchase the miner and start tracing back the transactions and IPs involved.

However, it would make things much more difficult to trace overall. You could mine on address A, transfer a little bit to address B and then spend that.  No one would know that address A belonged to you - they would only know that A sent btc to you.  They wouldn't know why.

But, let's imagine you're a government Agent.   You think bitcoin user X has a bank deposit that you think is suspicious.   Think about all the steps you have to go through to track the person down.

1) Look at the bank transactions and see it was from an exchange
2) Go to the exchange and see what address the coins came from
3) Look up the address and see where the coins came from, see the address you mine from.
4) Supena the mining pool for the IP address used to mine. Okay, what if your mining over a VPN or tor? Lets say you do all the work to track down the originating IP address (Maybe the NSA stores a record of all consumer IP traffic in their yottabyte data center.  You look up the time stamps and see if bitcoin user X was online at the time, and sending traffic 'consistent' with bitcoin mining.  You can really only do this because you're looking at a specific person)

5) Okay step 5 you see what IP address was doing the mining based on guessing from tor "timing".
6) you get the physical address where the mining took place from
7) If the machines are still there, you can find out what company sent them.
8] Do the machines even have serial numbers?  Avalons don't, as far as I know.  maybe some of it does.
9) Okay, so you take the serial number and you find out who the company sold it too - oops someone totally different since you bought this machine online
10) Okay so you track down the person who sold the machine to user X and get the TX id used to buy the miner from them. If they even kept records.

Aaaaaaaanyway, you see how much work this is and why the government wouldn't bother except in extreme cases. It wouldn't be perfectly anonymous... but whatever.

oooops sorry now I got what you were saying, I've simply miss the premise: miner bought using illegal money, sorry for the noise.  

You mean before estimated month of shipment or before real day of shipment ?

If you are saying that you can take illegal money, buy mining hardware with it and then suddenly the mined coins are going to be completely untainted in the eyes of the law, I believe you are wrong.

mmm can't parse this last sentence, I dunno about legality but speaking of validity this [1] plus a little bit of economic theory should suffice, doesn't it?

[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

But then you don't have laundered money, you have "clean coins" but you still don't have an explanation for where it came for, which I believe is the main point of money laundering. You want a valid, legal source for that money, I don't see how mining does this, it certainly makes it less traceable though.

Even solo is not anonymous...check AnonyMint's posts if you like, especially one in the Newbies section.

No, because there's no link between the mining hardware and the coins mined.  A new coin is a new coin.  There's no trace of who mined it.

However.

If you're mining on a pool the pool could keep a record of your IP and associate your address with the IP you were using to mine from. You could use TOR, but isn't it likely that most of the TOR exit nodes are run by the NSA anyway?

The only way to get totally untraceable coins is to solo mine, which is pretty risky.

If you were going to mine to launder money, wouldn't you have to launder the money to buy the mining hardware?
Craziest reason to mine ever. Also, lacks understanding of IRS.

If you you wish to account for the difficulty of converting fiat into bitcoins, i suggest you also account for the difficulty of converting those bitcoins into fiat.
If you could, what are the fees, risks, delays, disparities between exchanges, tightening regulations etc?
Add that all up (if possible) and give me the bottom line comparison.

Thank you for focusing on just one of the six arguments i presented.  I assume you're fine with the rest.

Edit:  People are willing to pay 50% moar for clean coins?  UR kidding?  What fresh new level of money-laundering ineptitude is this?

You avoided my question in a previous post or missed it...

EDIT: But just remembered you actually answered it later to another post replying to someone else for the same issue so nevermind!

This is the most repeated snobbish falsehood on bitcointalk

Tell me where you can easily buy bitcoins with a credit card to the same extent that you can buy a miner?   If you could, what are the fees involved?

add that all up (if possible) and give me the bottom line comparison


And I won't even bring up the 'virgin coins' angle where there are people that will accept half ROI to make their own coins if you know what I mean

ahh, it will be so cool, if 1st day of shipment will be sometimes during second week of Septmber #wetdream

The timeline that someone worked out calculated that chips would arrive the second week in September.

Alright, alright.
I'm just saying don't get seduced by precision over accuracy.
The calculator gives these wonderfully precise and believable numbers, but they're just a calculated guess and they won't be accurate.
Whatever it comes up with now, -$546, +$1200, whatever, the reality will be different.

of course, you can ask for refund anytime before day of shipment.