United Kingdom's national crime agency (NCA) seeks to regulate the crypto coin mixers under the country's laws against money laundering. Coin mixing tools are popular in the decentralized world to maintain the privacy of transactions. These tools often mix several transactions to obscure the origin of a particular transaction. Then the recipient receives the transactions from a mixing "black box" that comprises hundreds of transactions from various wallets. While privacy-focused, these tools often face regulators' ire as it is also a known way for hackers and criminals to wash their funds. Gary Cathcart, the NCA's head of financial investigation, claimed …

CoinJoin, a popular Bitcoin (BTC) mixing tool, will block transactions associated or flagged as illegal. The announcement came from the official Wasabi Wallet Twitter account, which Coinjoin is a part of. The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins. pic.twitter.com/X3kBuQwieO — Wasabi Wallet (@wasabiwallet) March 13, 2022 The official announcement noted that CoinJoin services would start blocking certain unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) from registering with the CoinJoin with the help of the zkSNACKs coordinator. A zkSNACKs coordinator is a virtual machine used to mix the origin of the transitions. Privacy-focused mixing tools are primarily used to …

One of the original allures of cryptocurrency is the narrative that using them provides the sender or recipient anonymously, but this is a common misconception within the sector. In reality, Bitcoin (BTC) and many other cryptocurrencies are easily traceable. Proof of this came earlier this week when on April 27, U.S. authorities arrested the mastermind of Bitcoin Fog, a darknet-based BTC mixing service. Authorities were able to capture the operator after analyzing ten years of blockchain data. One doesn't need to be a forensic analyst to know that every single transaction is tied up to addresses on the blockchain and …

Multi-platform blockchain explorer Blockchair has added a “privacy-o-meter” for every Bitcoin (BTC) transaction that identifies which part is the change. This is the key to tracing a chain of transactions on the blockchain. While the Bitcoin blockchain is theoretically transparent, in practice it can be hard to identify the true flow of funds. Unless the wallet is drained completely, every transaction includes at least two unspent transaction outputs (UTXO), where one of them is returned to the sender as change. Blockchair uses several basic and advanced heuristics to assign a privacy score. For example, in a low privacy transaction one …

Bitcoin (BTC) users who employ privacy tool CoinJoin to add anonymity to their transactions face a major wake-up call after exchange Binance froze a withdrawal. In an ongoing Twitter debate which began Dec. 19, a user by the name of Catxolotl uploaded what appeared to be correspondence from Binance Singapore staff stating they had launched an “investigation” into a withdrawal of an unknown amount of BTC. Binance: we “do not tolerate” CoinJoin The reason, they said, was Catxolotl was using CoinJoin via wallet provider Wasabi. A Binance representative confirmed the problem in private comments, explaining: “Binance SG operates under the …

Co-founder and CEO of major U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Brian Armstrong attracted criticism after praising private crypto transactions in a tweet published on June 22. In the aforementioned tweet, Armstrong notes that “a scalable, sufficiently decentralized, chain that supported private transactions by default (privacy coins) would be a game changer.” He then compares anonymous cryptocurrency transactions to cryptography on the web, pointing out that it is increasingly predominant. He also used messaging as an example: “Same with messaging, end to end encryption started out fringe and is now the expected default.” Armstrong also cited the recent news about the Electric …

The IRS is actively seeking out tax evaders using Bitcoin, employing tools like Chainalysis to unmask them. Many people believe that Bitcoin is anonymous, but it is in fact pseudonymous. All transactions linked to a particular address are visible on the Blockchain, which is public and transparent. However, it is not possible to link a particular wallet address to the real world identity of a person/company without any additional information. While good privacy practices can prevent leakage of information, there is always a point where Bitcoin transactions touch the traditional monetary system (when you use it in a store or …