Bitcoin offers privacy—as long as you don't cash out or spend it

On the surface, Bitcoin seems to be a great way to hide cash. Actually, it’s a terrible way to launder money.

That’s the conclusion of a new academic study that analyzed Bitcoin’s blockchain, or the public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The ledger shows how bitcoins move from one person to another, represented by 34-character alphanumeric addresses.


Most bitcoin users interact with a service to buy or sell the virtual currency. These days, most of those services want to know exactly who they’re dealing with, especially as regulators around the world take an increasing interest in bitcoin.



For example, they linked more than 500,000 Bitcoin addresses with Mt. Gox, a popular exchange in Japan where users buy and sell bitcoins. Mt. Gox requires identification from its users, often including a scan of their passport. It wouldn’t make sense for a hacker to cash out a large number of bitcoins there.

To catch a bitcoin thief



“Maybe thieves and other criminals in the future are going to become a lot more sophisticated, but I think so far, people have not been particularly careful,” she said.



“We saw a lot of people deposit into Silk Road directly from their Mt. Gox address,” Meiklejohn said. In those cases, law enforcement would have minimal work to obtain the name of a user if they presented a legal order to Mt. Gox.

Money laundering is not impossible, but it is not particularly attractive with bitcoin. “It seems like an offshore account at this point would be a lot easier,” she said.


“I do think inherently Bitcoin can provide you with a huge amount of anonymity, but the argument here is you have to work for it,” Meiklejohn said. But most patterns of bitcoin use “indicate most users are falling short.”


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