| This is what passes as academic studies these days, it's so pathetic, just look at how it fails to identify what it is that they are establishing: > It has been a totem of the cryptocurrency community that the numeric addresses of Bitcoin and other wallets will protect the identity of those using them to buy and sell. A new paper, released this week by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, has shattered that presumed anonymity. Which is it? Is it Bitcoin's or some alt's public address wallets? No one who has read the white paper, which is fewer and fewer people including researchers, would make such an ignorant claim because as you said it's designed as a pseudonymous system. Furthermore, since the advent of centralized exchanges that require KYC and AML (everything after MTGOX that wasn't BTC-e) and blockchain forensics would know that its not hard to track IDs that way. Its why the notion of red-flaging and tainting was so prevalent with these exchanges: they just went back 2-4 transactions and associated with things like DNMs or online gambling and refused to process the tx and froze accounts entirely as was the case with CONbase. The truth is that this is a feature of mainchain since we have not made full use of Taproot and other OPSEC/Security features because of delays (Segwit/USAF caused so many delays), and even LE has made it clear that BTC main-chain is perhaps the dumbest way to commit any crime because of it's relative easily traceability [0]. Privacy and security are concerns and should be addressed, but Bitcoin moves incredibly slow for a reason, and the only one's stupid enough to use it to commit crimes when other alts (monero, zcash etc...) exist at their MO deserve to get pinched. I'm sure we will have default mixing at some point with batching but until then it will always be an additional cost and legwork if you have some link to a KYC/AML exchange in your tx history. 0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/12/28/using... |