"I'm sorry, I don't know why someone mailed me a box of drugs. Could have been anyone that placed the order. Want to arrest me for this? Great, looking forward to next week when you'll be arresting your entire HQ for receiving drugs from Silk Road."
[Note: You don't actually say that, rather, your attorney argues the above with reference to the rules of evidence and burden of proof; and asserts that receiving a box of drugs in the mail is insufficient proof by itself that you ordered it, and the only other evidence is that a series of jumbled characters paid for it.]
Um, the police already know all of this. If they use this information, they are not just going to rock up to court with (purportedly) your public transaction history and a subpoena showing that you got a pizza delivered using bitcoins and get a conviction.
They're going to use it to get a warrant to search your house.
And yeah, this trawler like approach will not catch everybody. But it could score a lot of convictions very quickly.
Details, please. How are they able to do that in practice? There seems to be a lot claims like these hanging around, and not many explaining the steps in practice.
Im not an expert, but I will try (and if im wrong, let me know).
When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef.
When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.
> When you purchase something via bitcoins, it is public information. You have an address that is public that says abcdef bought this. abcdef cant be traced back to anyone unless you publicly announce you are abcdef.
Definitely not. Transactions are public, but definitely not the information that connects transactions to identities or merchants.
> When you buy a pizza, you are saying abcdef lives at this address. So anyone with a subpoena on Dominos records can tie your address to your previous purchases.
Also wrong. If you send the transaction from a web wallet, the merchant receiving the coins can hardly say anything about you.
It seems that there are lots of trolls here shouting something about bitcoin which they don't really know much about.
I am saying that a transaction is public, not the details.
I am also saying that dominos will have that transaction tied to the delivery address. This is not intrinsic to bitcoin, its all done on dominos side as part of delivering a pizza.
So let me try again:
If abc transfers bitcoins to xyz, and the FBI knows that xyz is a drug dealer, then it sees that abc transfers bitcoins to DOM, then it can subpeona dominos records and find the address of someone who purchased drugs from xyz.
The assumptions I am making: the FBI knows that xyz is a drug dealer. the FBI knows that DOM is dominos.
Are the assumptions wrong? Would the FBI be able to know that?
I'm not sure why people make this kind of jokes. Yes some Bitcoin users use Bitcoin to buy drugs. And? What's your point? One of the most popular drugs is about to get legal soon in US.
