Bitcoin Forum

How viable and legal will it be for these 3 letter agencies to create a supposed 100% anonymous Alt coin <with a back door> to serve as a perfect Honey trap for criminals?

Let's say with the code being Open source and it being very difficult to hide these backdoors, would it not be more practical to establish a "Market place" platform where backdoors could be hidden to trap these criminals?

Most developers are so busy that they hardly have time to scrutinize every Alt coin for "Backdoors", so they might slip through the Peer review process.

Imagine if these loopholes already exist in some of these Alt coins that are supposedly more anonymous. <Dash / Monero >

I am not worried about the criminals getting caught, because they should get punished if they use this technology for crime. I am worried about those innocent victims who are using this technology, because they think it is more anonymous and they are donating to organizations that are blocked by other payment methods. <WikiLeaks etc.>

Im not a coder so i dont actually know if its possible but im sure
coders would have spotted this on existing coins.

I am struggling to understand how you would trap anyone though?

Payments and transfers can and are being tumbled and mixed so
wouldnt that erase any back door facility?

Yeah, it's impossible to hide backdoors in open source projects, someone will find it out. There were rumors about a possible backdoor in Zcash, FUD. Privacy-centric coins use different cryptographic techniques to achieve anonymity/privacy and I guess Zcash's, zk-SNARKs protocol is the most complicated. A government agency launching their own privacy coin to catch criminals is a possibility, assuming if they used some sort of new or highly complicated privacy protocol to hide a backdoor, it wouldn't be possible to immediately identify it, it's less likely to happen than governments establishing a marketplace to trap criminals. Last year, the FBI, DEA, and the the National Dutch Police shut down two of the largest Dark Web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa. Before shutting down, the Dutch Police operated Hansa for about a month without the buyers/sellers realizing it.

But how can Anonymous Alt Coins that are under deregulation policy be secured and protected from Criminals through loopholes of Back doors by Law enforcement Agents that are Government Securities except for where the Governments are in place to support Crypto in such community? I stand to be corrected anyway. But I feel it is to the best interest of Developers to closely trigger efforts in working against all noted Back doors that can slip away these coins to the hands of these criminals, and more so, set trap that can arrest the malicious and cruel criminals, where efforts of the Law enforcement agents be sort to track and bring them to book where and when they are observed.

It is not as if these guys are not trying. We saw what happened in Bitcoin XT. I also know that these agencies are hosting their own exit nodes on Tor, so it is being done. I can see a scenario in the future where one of these agencies might come forward with information or they get exposed on WikiLeaks again for running a "Honey trap" alt coin.

"Vault 7" should have been an eye-opener for many people, on how equipped these agencies are. Be careful out there.  ::)

Stop using Crypto currencies for illegal things. ^grrrrrr^