How do you seize crypto if it's anonymous? Secure?

Just need to catch someone logging in?

https://apnews.com/article/...

I dunno bug their phone or whatever device they have their wallet on ?

I find it funny when people say bitcoit is anonymous and untracable.

Every single transaction is quite literally public domain for.. ever?

Afaik Monero tries to mitigate that somehow, but I don't know the details

@MadMadMadMrMim how do you even find the guy though tho?

@LotsOfCaffeine one aspect is knowing who’s on one side or the other but then that can be found out potentially

I have heard that it has been traceable to the persons involved for at least 5 years. While the common belief was it was not. So criminals have been using it thinking they were safe. Honey pot.

@Demolishun but you need to link the account to a name but anytime I believe can just create a wallet? Without providing any identifying info?

@donuts Then I guess it would be to the machine or network. Not sure if vpn helps with this. I don't know how its done though.

@donuts It may have required supporting data. The kind of data you get from the NSA.

@Demolishun afaik its in the "blockchain".
the history of transactions is used in the verification process.
i believe thats what @LotsOfCaffeine was alluding to.
couldnt explain exactly how better than wiki tho

Bitcoin is not anonymous. You can trace every single bitcoin ever. That's the whole point of the blockchain. There's different currencies like Monero that are untraceable in theory.

@synemeup but the only thing you end up tracing to is the account number? And I guess all related accounts it traded with.

But he do you then link it to a particular person.

Though I guess to get it as cash again, you have to register with a crypto exchange which slow need that info.

So guess it was all anonymous until the moment they tried to cash out.

@donuts if they knew what they were doing it would be a fake id.

plenty of those, especially in russia (not russia to look at but its neighbors. like afghanistan.
you make a true fake id by taking a passport from a shtf country so that there is no central power to verify with. also less thechnological so less secure)

@donuts Not only cashing but it is also linked with the goods or services bought with transaction.
If one orders things with Bitcoin, and later the marketplace is busted, the physical addresses can now be linked to the coin address.

If multiple actions are done with the same bitcoin address, it might be even easier to create a profile of the user, as there are more data points.

@synemeup as @donuts is saying, BTC is totally anonymous because your NAME isn't put into the blockchain, just your wallet ID. And yes, every transaction that your wallet has ever been involved in is stored permanently in the blockchain, not just for history purposes, but because that's how verifying transactions work. You don't technically have an "account balance", you have a sum of all transactions.

If you go through coin dealers they may get your name when you try to cash out, but you can just go through a 3rd party or sell your coins to another investor directly. No machine data is recorded in the blockchain (no room - blocks are only 10MB and miners get paid bonus coins for how many transactions they validate per block. They won't waste data on anything other than what is absolutely essential).

NSA and other organizations spend millions to track how crypto transactions are related to each other :)

if you want to be fully anonymous you need to figure out a way to break the link of transactions to a traceable identity

@AlgoRythm By definition, this is not anonymity, but pseudonymity.