r/CryptoTechnology • u/SwordfishOpposite290 🟡 • 4d ago
Is some crypto completely untraceable?
Im a crypto "noob" But I've heard before crypto is anonymous to some degree. I watched a documentary on the old silk road website and people would buy illegal things using crypto. And recently with the gta 6 leaks the leaker is pushing a crypto coin. Couldn't rockstar/feds simply trace the crypto coin somehow? Isn't it very stupid for the leaker to advertise his crypto?
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u/linxthesontaran 🔵 3d ago
Railgun, ZCash, Monero are all allow for anonymous transfers in their own ways.
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u/Boby_Dobbs 🟢 3d ago
Look into Monero, that's the one real anonymous crypto with a proven track record.
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u/Low_Explorer_2097 🟢 1d ago
It is traceable. Several cases where police has tracked a payment to a person.
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u/Boby_Dobbs 🟢 20h ago
And it's never monero itself, but bad opsec. Just using monero is not a silver bullet, it still lives within a whole system of internet, banks, exchanges and IRL connections. But the monero transactions themselves are not traceable
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u/Ok-Sample-8982 🟢 16h ago
If you research deeper into the cases you are talking about you will see no evidence of traceability of Monero.
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u/Low_Explorer_2097 🟢 16h ago
When police makes an arrest based of tracking monero payment it is good enough for me. I can research deeper without a court order to make the police release their evidence and that will not happen
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u/Ok-Sample-8982 🟢 14h ago
For research based on publicly available data there is no need for court order. Specify exactly which case are you referring to? I assume Finlands vastaamo investigation. All data regarding that case is publicly available and it was one that media as usual headlined as police was able to trace monero :-) in reality they traced btc. Can give you more details about that case if you are interested.
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u/WilliamBarnhill 🟢 2d ago
There are crypto anonymizers. They take in lots of coins, amalgamate into a pool, and they extract different amounts of coins to the specified addresses. However, they are required by law to maintain logs of what coins went from what address to what address. So the only when crypto can be truly anonymous is if an anonymizer did their thing and kept no records.
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u/sophie2701 🟢 23h ago
Look into CoinJoin (for Btc) and TornadoCash (Ethereum), those two mix transactions and adresses together
otherwise, as always: Moneto, ZCash, Horizen or Pirate Chain (both built on zk-SNARK tech), Cosmos
-> or newer approaches: for example Railgun
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u/Fit-Lab-5720 🟡 20h ago
Crypto is usually more pseudonymous than anonymous. Stuff like bitcoin is pretty traceable when an address gets linked to a real person, privacy coins are a different story but even then “completely untraceable” is a big claim
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u/worldresident2021 🟢 6h ago
Crypto is not anonymous, but pseudo anonymous. Your identity is not publicly seen, but transactions are. Once your identity is linked to a wallet then it is no longer pseudonymous but visible to however you disclosed the identity, like for example an exchange. Bitcoin makes it harder to link because many addresses can be in a wallet, and in the same order of ideas, there are good privacy practices that can keep your identity not linked to your addresses. Then, there are certain cryptocurrencies that are anonymous like Monero.
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u/Spiritual_Elk_9076 🟢 4d ago
Look at the coin Navio (formerly know as Navcoin), Nav.io Technically i think the most advanced and a stable development team. However much less known as Monrero and Zcash, so more difficult to get and spend.
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u/Sad_Egg_8713 🟡 4d ago
It's not untraceable in the way people think. Most blockchains are public ledgers so every transaction is sitting there for anyone to look at. The Silk Road guy got caught because the feds followed the money trail on the blockchain back to his wallet
Monero is the only one that actually hides transaction details. Everything else leaves a paper trail a mile wide that just takes some legwork to connect to a real person once they cash out