Skip to main content TRENDING: SPONSORED: Bitcoin tech may be the future, but it raises serious antitrust questions The Hill 1625 K Street, NW Suite 900 Washington DC 20006 | 202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 faxThe contents of this site are ©2017 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.Share The public often thinks of bitcoin as anonymous but, in reality, the original cryptocurrency is anything but.The digital ledger keeps every transaction in open view, raising major privacy questions in age of increasing internet surveillance.Just last week, the U.S.Postal Inspection Service, the postal service’s law enforcement wing, published a job listing for “Intelligence Gathering Specialist” with a specialty in identifying bitcoin users.“Candidates shall be capable of performing a prioritized assessment of the data to identify the most critical and reliable data in order to identify , bitcoins, locations, accounts, services, travels, email addresses, IP addresses and other pattern of life data in an effort to determine physical attribution of an Internet identity,” the job posting read.

Much work has been done on bringing strong anonymity to popular cryptocurrencies including Zcash, a relatively new project described by former Bitcoin Foundation head and security researcher Peter Vessenes as “a giant leap forward” in privacy.Three University of Illinois researchers published on Monday a new network redesign of bitcoin called Dandelion “which achieves nearly-optimal anonymity guarantees at minimal cost to the network’s utility.” Dandelion, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or deployed, aims for anonymity by mixing messages from different users on a graph that remains hidden from adversaries.The system is named for how messages are spread randomly and ubiquitously over the network, a pattern resembling a dandelion’s seed head (see Figure 4).Much of that has been credited to speculation but there’s no question that a significant percentage is real usage.Bitcoin’s privacy is widely misunderstood, even among many cybercriminals who rely on anonymity to maintain their freedom.

Perusing any dark net forum will reveal a mountain of half-informed conversations with loud arguments about how to launder and privatize the currency.It’s a world ripe with abject guessing about safety and security.Monero and Zcash, two digital currencies focused expressly on privacy, have markets of $164 million and $20 million respectively.Privacy and anonymity for cryptocurrency always has attracted serious attention both from those looking for obscurity and the government agencies who want the opposite.-In this Story- anonymization, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, U.S.Postal Service, University of Illinois, ZcashWhile Bitcoin has a number of great uses, it can still be potentially misused.The very fact that the bitcoin can be misused has led to a lot of speculations about the digital currency followed by ill-informed, unsubstantiated paranoid remarks about its use to fund terror organizations and money laundering.The number of terrorist attacks across the world has been increasing lately.

In most of these terrorist attacks, especially the ones happening in the Middle East and Europe, the role of terrorists belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant group has been established.bitcoin honey badger of moneyThe latest of the ISIL attacks came earlier this week when they carried out a suicide bomb attack in Brussels, Belgium killing 34 people.bitcoin sheffieldThe attack has again evoked a response from the well-known hacker collective group, Anonymous.bitcoin 980 gtxIn a recorded video message, a member of the Anonymous group announced that the group will beef up its counteroffensive against the ISIL by disrupting their internet activity and leaking sensitive information about the terrorist group.bitcoin ervaring

This is not the first time for Anonymous to issue such threats and make good of it.Earlier, following the Paris attacks, Anonymous had issued similar threats.ethereum nigeriaMany hacker groups have been working against ISIL.litecoin mining desktopSome of them have also claimed to have found and stolen the bitcoin stash belonging to the terrorist group.While these claims haven’t been substantiated yet by the European law enforcement agency- Europol which upon investigation claimed that there were no signs of terrorists using funds in the form of bitcoin to plan and launch attacks in Paris.However, the Europol’s investigation report did not make much difference to the government witch-hunt to find bitcoin’s involvement in these terror attacks.Even though there aren’t many clues to support their hunt, the governments will not rest easy until they are successful in banning them.

This calls for the next question, Is Bitcoin helping terrorists to fund their operations?unfortunately, there is no straight answer for this.It is likely that the ISIL has some funds parked in bitcoin along with other fiat currency, gold etc. Bitcoin by itself is not helping terrorists spread fear across the world by supplying necessary funds to carry out attacks.Bitcoin makes up for a small fraction compared to other fiat currency and gold.It has been reported through various channels that the ISIL is illegally exporting petroleum to Turkey and other places.One can be sure that these nations accepting stolen oil are not trying to pay for it in bitcoin.Payments on the illegal oil shipments are generally received in cash, wire transfer or services in kind.With close to 50 percent of fiat currency notes ever printed still in circulation outside the country (e.g.It makes sense for the terrorists to use cash instead of bitcoin.Cash transactions are much more untraceable than bitcoin.Bitcoin transactions can be retraced by using a blockchain explorer.