Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.

I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

  • hansolo@lemmy.today
    1·
    4 days ago

    Not sure if you saw my edit in the previous comment as it looks like you were responding at the same time. Back in the day, my guy made everyone that bought from him move to PayPal because, at the time, cops didn’t want to do the extra work to subpoena PayPal. Plus, it meant less cash at his house, so less robbery risk. Things change, and I’m not trying to mess with you or freak you out - I’m genuinely trying to let you know you’re holding onto an idea that stopped being low-risk 5 years ago and now using BTC is not a great idea. I’m trying to help you because I do, in fact, know what the fuck I’m talking about. FFS, you’re being rescued, please do not resist.

    Don’t feel like reading? Here’s videos: Reviews of crypto forensics platforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxmvQO2INE Your wallet is a data point that companies monetize by selling the data to law enforcement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGvNfGu_dio

    Because it’s not just you and D and John in the world - fraud cases are also adding pressure to law enforcement to track wallets. So you’re up against millions in software companies and AI tools and old people losing money pushing these tools to go anywhere and see everything. https://youtu.be/AjxA_xBjcxE?t=389

    Let’s get personal. Here’s two scenarios that do play out all the time, and which federal, state, and local cops contract out to get network intel on this:

    1. So there’s You, John, your guy D, Tom and Janet. You don’t know Tom and Janet at all. Tom wants to buy mollies and party favors from D and because Tom’s a dick, he gets $500 out of the ATM over 2 days and asks Janet to buy BTC from Coinbase, with KYC. $500 of BTC gets bought and goes to Tom’s wallet. Tom buys $300 in party favors and leaves $200 in the wallet. Seven months later Tom gets busted for DUI and in the process gets a possession charge because of a roach in his car’s ash tray that wasn’t even his. None of this touches, you, right?

    It’s a public ledger, so all BTC transactions are visible, both wallet names and values. And at this point, BTC wallets are part of the typical asset investigation list because it’s so easy to track. KYC shows Janet bought BTC and immediately sent it. Tom is a bitch and for probation gives up D’s name. D is now associated with that wallet. Local PD sit on D for a month looking at who comes and goes. and seeing which wallets touch D’s wallet. That OSINT link I sent you is all about this. So the PD gets one pic of you walking up to D’s house - so they have your face, which goes into ClearviewAI and gets them your name, address, phone number, etc. They notice that one wallet connected to D also serves as a hub and making BTC purcahses and immediate payments to lots of wallets, Because John doesn’t take cash just from you, John takes cash from lots of people to buy BTC. That’s John and D both easily on the list for subpoenas for phone records. After sitting on John for 2 weeks and D for 4 weeks, PD picks them both up. John’s phone has Whatsapp messages, and the PD subpoenas Meta for those messages and Celebrite the rest. You accidentally called not on Whatsapp once, and you’re connected to John - but you’re also connected to D. You’re just one of a dozen or two nodes in the network map that get picked up over the next week because you’ve left a trail.

    You use a mixer? Cute - guess who has flagged the use of mixers as probable cause? https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2025-06/Public-Alert-Cryptocurrency-Mixing.pdf

    1. D has a connect/supplier, right? D isn’t growing keys in the garden. Let’s call that supplier Mack. Mack supplies 5 people: D, R, T, B, and P. P gets busted 2 states away and has a trail leading to Mack. Mack has a trail that leads to D. D has to move what he gets paid around so he can buy groceries, right? So that’s a trail leading to someone else with KYC or red flags from mixers. And then we’re back in the same scenario as above - anything that touches D can come back to you and people who you’ve never met can bring it all down. A pattern can easily get established where you get out $300 cash and within a week, $300 or less goes to John into a new wallet. Those new payments happen within 24 hours of you going to visit D, in the same exact amounts.

    Chainalysis LOVES that you think BTC is even slightly anonymous. “Senator, cash is, indeed, far less traceable than cryptocurrency.” - https://youtu.be/DSyGE3BDpVg?t=65

    Here’s detectives talking up how easy it is to track you, across different coins, across mixers, there are methods Mostly that there’s no delay between a payment happening and going to another wallet… https://youtu.be/AjxA_xBjcxE?t=389

    And they are willing to wait. And that data stays in play for YEARS. You been buying from D for 4 years? that’s 4 years of patterns. THAT is the data trail you and D and John have left, not what you do today. It’s what you’ve been doing.