[vmception]

> Some criminals undertake what is known as “chain-hopping” — jumping between different cryptocurrencies, often in rapid succession — to lose trackers, or use particular “privacy coin” cryptocurrencies that have extra anonymity built into them, such as Monero.

Its kind of hilarious that an article in mid-2021 treats this as novel, or that it is novel to many people reading it now.

To me this is like reading about bearer bonds from a 1950s heist.

Chain-hopping is as old as crypto exchanges. It has some folly, because even if a chain analysis firm or armchair blockchain sleuths aren't inspired enough to consider or look on another chain, the records are still permanent.

Hopping over to XMR or privacy chains has been available since 2014. Even with older versions leaking some rings, the best practices from back then still mitigate that, and rotating anytime since 2017 ensures mitigation through now.

The article lacks anything coherent, providing maybe a tiny spark of inspiration for investigators and people enamored by the crypto phenomenon, but wasting everybody's time because there are other techniques fairly unique to the crypto space that are more accessible and efficient and not secret at all.

[Ceezy]

Well everybody is just not as in the loop as you are. Not sure what is hilarious about that...

[vmception]

The point is that this article conflates several things and is describing some fairly outdated or inefficient obfuscation techniques of which launderers would be some of the users of.

It goes from Hydra market duffle-bags of cash hiders (lolwut), to chain-hopping and scant mention of privacy coins. It randomly talks about Wasabi wallet same-chain bitcoin mixers, and then talks about Bitcoin Fog's operator being arrested which is much much older technology. It doesn't acknowledge or provide awareness about people actually wanting the privacy coins to begin with or staying within the mixing system (or trading claims to assets in the mixing system), and just assumes people are trying to obfuscate briefly with the end goal of holding non-private coins or fiat.

I don't get the impression that they were avoiding describing useful techniques for criminals, I get the impression that they have no idea.

[PEJOE]

> I get the impression that they have no idea.

I suspect this is the case; I used to really enjoy the FT but think the spark has gone since the Nikkei acquisition.