I’ve never been too concerned about the traceability of bitcoin because I always got it by paying in cash, they wouldn’t be able to connect the wallet to my identity.
But also because the police aren’t going to launch an investigation into one person buying personal consumption amount of drugs online. Well, not unless they already knew your identity and were already coming after you, but in that case you’d be fucked regardless of which cryptocurrency you used. The traceability is something only dealers and people who buy in bulk need to worry about.
Once you bust one vendor or market, it’s pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it’s on chain it’s there forever; don’t make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.
(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)
I’ve never been too concerned about the traceability of bitcoin because I always got it by paying in cash, they wouldn’t be able to connect the wallet to my identity.
But also because the police aren’t going to launch an investigation into one person buying personal consumption amount of drugs online. Well, not unless they already knew your identity and were already coming after you, but in that case you’d be fucked regardless of which cryptocurrency you used. The traceability is something only dealers and people who buy in bulk need to worry about.
Once you bust one vendor or market, it’s pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it’s on chain it’s there forever; don’t make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.
(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)