Bitcoin Forum

The biggest thing that I always hear as a negative is the money laundering aspect.  Now it seems to me as if it is the exact opposite.  I know its anonymous but can be eventually tracked once you have the wallet ID, right?  Law enforcement can look up all illegal transactions on the blockchain like they did with silk road.  Whereas nothing would be better for Money laundering than the us dollar.  You can pass those to anyone with absolutely no proof!!  It just seems to me like you could argue there are some drawbacks to bitcoin but money laundering is not one!

yea i dont think that bitcoin can really be untraceable. sort of but not completly. and in any way if you have a lot of money and no proof of it. irs is gonna come knockin at your door

Cash money is best for money laundring, Bitcoin is kinda traceable, you only don't know who the person is.

What I don't understand is : Why are some guys moving 20000BTC or more from one wallet to the other, some times you can see that they used more than 100 or so wallets... But at the end you can still see the 20000K BTC lol.... Effort for nothing ?

I always wondered how anonymous is BTC -> random alt coin -> BTC
I guess it is quite untraceable

bitcoin is bad for money laudering:

1 - tiny market cap. Drug traffic alone generates 100x that or more
2 - public transations, and public information about the transations in public domain. Your corrupted police officers and judges can't prevent the good guys to get that information. Maybe not a problem for the small Silk Road drug dealer, but can be a big risk for the big fishes
3 - Hard to obtain. Use exchanges would be too noisy.

The real "problem" with btc would be tax evasion and an easy way to get your money outside the state's grip. Like a swiss bank account for the poors.

And maybe also a way to bypass the labour laws, if btc payments gets popular to hire people.

The first aspect is correct, but.. only for now, If bitcoin gets huge market cap in several years, that wouldn't be a problem to deal with big amounts of money, It's just time question.

It really is, couple that with sending that alt to another exchange and withdrawing BTC from there and its literally untraceable.

I think they have "mixing" services which could probably be used to launder money with BTC.  However you still have to buy the BTC from an exchange or from people so that would take some effort.  But yes I think once someone figures out which wallet belongs to a certain person you can track it.

The bitcoin killer is here - Monero

True anonymity

this is right if you know whos wallet is whos you can track it. but just like cash unless u see someone recieve the money you cant prove they have it.

Yea I guess for a major money laundering operation Bitcoin wouldn't be the best option.

I would agree with the people that said cash, cold, hard, cash, would be the best way to launder money.  Why do you think the drug world all uses cash, and not bitcoins?  People who use bitcoin would probably tend to get a bit crazy and careless, hence the arrest of the owner of Silk Road.

Simply put, bitcoin is anonymous but traceable. 

True. All bitcoin transactions are public and traceable, but it is not easy to link the bitcoin address to the owner, or link the bitcoin transaction to a trade.

And that is the point I'm making also, that large sums of money is an issue to launder is hard.  But the same isn't so when it comes to smaller sums.

ok, it is possible to have your coins "washed" or in other words coinswapping.

With all those mixing services and as mentioned above the "bitcoin->altcoin->bitcoin" transaction, wouldn't it be hard to trace?

I don't think the gov't can tax the bitcoin transactions. The best they can do, is to tax when people trade bitcoin for fiat.