this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Crypto is not anonymous, the entire concept of how it works is to be the worlds most public and distributed transaction ledger. It is more difficult to track than credit card transactions, but that's a very big difference from being impossible to track. There have been multiple papers published at this point on how you can de-anonymize any crypto purchase.
People really need to get over this idea that using crypto to buy things makes you anonymous.
Exactly. That's why you had to fill out all the KYC paperwork when you create your Bitcoin wallet.
Oh, you didn't?
Crypto is not hidden, but it can be anonymous. You can't hide that you got money from X account and spent it at Y account. But there's no name tied to the transaction.
Where did the coin come from? Unless you mined it yourself, you've left a trail that may eventually lead to you. Even using crypto ATMs, you're still on surveillance and hoping the tapes/drives roll over before someone comes knocking (which is a very likely bet to win), and even then, you still have a real world location to tie the wallet to because of where the transaction originated.
Anything that interacts with the real world can anchor your identity to your wallet. Travelling out of state can help obfuscate that to an extent, but a high level adversary will be able to correlate travel with that transaction as well.
Ever heard of BTC/any-> XMR -> BTC/any?
If you know your thing, you can churn, buy the initial crypto with gift cards, use VPNs or Tor... yea GL for finding me