[carshodev]

Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening? Look up cases of gold bars being found in senators houses, those are actually MUCH less tracable.

Shitcoins and Shitstocks(some SPACs) do allow of a legal way to "give" others money through the transfer of value in a way that is technically legal. This again is not crypto specific though.

[greesil]

So the best part about being bribed with crypto is if one flees to another country to escape the law, one still has the aforementioned bribes. That plus some measure of anonymity.

[eucyclos]

Anonymity is the one thing cryptocurrency does not do well. It's much harder to sieze but much easier to trace.

[greesil]

Ethereum does it just fine

[eucyclos]

Maybe I should have said naturally rather than well. It's true that if privacy is your focus you can implement a Blockchain that achieves it, but at it's core Blockchain is a ledger of transactions that anyone can audit- privacy is not a natural outcome of that technology.

Which IMHO is a positive - no private transactions means corruption gets much harder, and that's always been a core selling point of the technology to me.

[greesil]

Tell me the US president's wallet address and how many payments have been in received. Try.

[ajross]

> Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening?

Undeniably yes, given the number of fraud and money laundering convictions achieved over the years.

> cases of gold bars [...] are actually MUCH less tracable.

Laughably false, given the difficulty of liquidating such things without detection. If you have to store your ill-gotten gains in your own home you've lost the opsec battle already.

I think you're just saying gold bars aren't digital information so don't a priori show up in a query somewhere. But the question that actually needs to be asked is "Did Menendez get caught with gold bars in his home?"

Yeah, he did. Ergo, they aren't very "untraceable" in practice.

[xnx]

Has the scale of bribery ever been as large and as broad before crypto?