[colechristensen]

In order to use crypto secretly you have to heavily launder your money in a way that’s not easy or guaranteed to work.. and the laundering itself is a crime which isn’t so easy to hide.

People think it’s private because they are told so but actually it’s a public ledger where anyone can see what you’ve spent and associate you fairly easily by your behavior and links to not so secret crypto addresses.

[ksksks1]

Not really. You buy mining resources to mine it as opposed to purchasing already mined bitcoin.

There’s rarely any paper trail between buying GPUs/ASICs and the mining itself. That’s why these currently sell above the amount they’d be profitable mining with. Because illicit actors are willing to pay a premium for anonymous crypto.

[colinmhayes]

Where can you buy GPUs/ASICs with crypto? Or are you just talking about the buyers? If the sellers get spooked I'm not sure it matters if buyers are safe.

[ls15]

> In order to use crypto secretly you have to heavily launder your money in a way that’s not easy or guaranteed to work.. and the laundering itself is a crime which isn’t so easy to hide.

Or you use Monero, which as far as I know is not illegal, let alone a crime.

[lmeyerov]

We've been getting increasingly involved in crypto investigation discussions, and largely:

- money side is getting more anonymous, e.g., monero / tornado

- ... in theory. Money crime still often using less anonymous schemes and often at exchange points, so chainanalysis-style companies still make sense, though decreasingly so IMO. A lot of the startups have shifted to verifying contracts, or providing (dubious) KYC risk scores, and interesting to consider why.

- For our customer base (half of which are sec/fraud/crime teams)... what's happening is the criminal platforms + participants have broken (digital) operational security. So it is more about offchain data (app logs, ...) and sometimes combining onchain<>offchain data. So not too different from our projects tracking malware/phishing/misinformation/etc via OSINT techniques (IP addresses, unmasked metadata, ...), or detecting account takeovers on their websites

- ... more new, IMO, in this space is areas like graph neural networks that have the potential to act smarter & more automatically, e.g., understanding behavior. Very early days here though, so interesting times !