Bitcoin Forum

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is one of the greatest things about bitcoins.  The stolen coins can be tracked and the spending of them will lead them back to the thief.

Thats something that can definitely not be done with fiat.

according to this i think u are wrong it cant lead to the thief but yes it can lead to the address to the ADDRESS of thief !! but i see there is no way to caught the thief with an address its very hard !! and if there is too many thief who have enough knowledge about hacking bitcoin address then all the bitcoin will be stolen and no bitcoins left for real users or the real owners of em!

As mentioned above we can all see the addresses involved, but addresses are not tied to identity, so we have no idea who owns them.

wrong.


bitmixer.


real economy -all coins will be recycled-

But at some point, they have to be traded for something of value.  Of course if they sit in an anonymous account forever they won't be caught but when they try to buy things or exchange for fiat at that point they can be tracked down.  Right?

the bitcoin community do not believe in blacklisting coins and source of coins can be 'washed' such that you can only conclude that the coins sent to you are stolen with some % certainty.

That's possible. But what if I send them to a mixing service? That would combine them with other coins until the trail is lost. There are also other ways to obfuscate the coins and make them hard to track.
This is why doing your own security is so important. It is easy to get away with stealing them. In fact, I don't know if anyone has ever been convicted for stealing coins?

Bitcoin is fairly new tech and in time will sure find ways to make life harder for thieves and scammers. In my opinion, some sort of regulation is needed if we want btc become mainstream. We cant alow btc is considered as monopoly money and thieves can do what they want doing great deal of dmg to bitcoin and all of us.

It would require tremendous effort to track a scammer/criminal, it could be done tho, but whoever wants to do that must have massive resources.
If the scammer used something like Monero then you are shit out of luck.

regulation deserve nothing.
trust and serious job must have reward.

bitcoin is in this way, it's a tangible "store of value".

if bitstamp was hack ... it's because of lack ... or because, they want do more with less.

computer security must be ... used when it's needed.

no really,because you can mix them and you don't know when they change of owner, so you don't really know who are that bitcoins from

I think at some point an address can be tied to a person  Some examples would be:

Pay for lunch with BTC - Cameras/Witnesses
Trading BTC for fiat - Identity is known for Wire Transfers
Buying a TV through NewEgg - Name/Shipping Address
Selling Coins to People - WU has cameras, Loading cards gives places you spent at which have cameras not to mention phone numbers and IP addresses

Pretty much anything that involves you getting a good or a physical service you can be identified.

The only thing I can think of you can do with BTC that is anonymous is trade between coins, make more BTC, and look at them.

Citizens might have a hard time tracking down a person, but law enforcement with warrants and all their other goodies could find people easy enough.

I think that is one of the things that hurt Bitcoins the most.  For the most part, credit cards are easily tracked and you can find out where/who stole your card information pretty easily.  

You can gather the bitcoin address of the people who stole your stuff, but that does you absolutely no good.

If the thief has managed to sell the stolen coins anonymously, there will be no way to track him down. The buyer of the stolen Bitcoins can't be made responsible for the theft (Though I might be checking where these BTC were coming from, before I'd buy them)

There are mixing services, there are anonymous coins you can buy then sent to another wallet(s) and make your tracks vanish... unfortunately the thieves have more means to hide than 2 years ago.

yea you can see where they are sent and
"spent" i guess but virtually getting those coins back is like a dream lol , u can use a wallet from some jun k computer at a library and realisticly you would probly never find the man or woman that steal from you. its crazy

 ::) really ? Good luck to fo this ... before or after shipping.
try this with exchange to identify the miner ...  ;D

Just doesn't make sense to me........21 million out there......5 million stolen
I would think it's as easy as clamping down on the 16 million by tracking their addresses etc. any movement thereafter should raise a red flag?

5 milion usd worth of btc was stolen, not 5 million bitcoins

Not in all cases. They can always be passed through a mixer and be sent to random addresses. If they hit an exchange, then becomes harder to trace.

They can be broken up in smaller transactions and mixed. It will take time and will incur a lot of fees but its possible to get away cleanly.

They would be stupid to send to an exchange. Exchange owners have to show they are responsible and any good one will immediately lock the funds.

Merchants are probably not going to help anyone in recovering stolen cons.
Let's say I stole a bunch of bitcoins and bought a nice 70" LCD HDTV from Newegg (value of $3000 USD)
Newegg shipped it to me and they know who I am.
Three weeks later some guy in Japan tracked the transaction/address and contacts Newegg to get his stolen bitcoins back.
What is the incentive for Newegg to do anything at all? If they do all the work how will Newegg benefit from it? If it is proven that I did buy the HDTV with stolen bitcoins, Newegg has to give the bitcoins back to the owner, and then they have to go through more trouble to get their HDTV back or sue me for the $3000 USD value.
Why would any merchant go through the headaches and lose money to help someone in another country?
If they sit and do nothing, their bitcoins gets exchanged and they get their money for the products they sold.

The fact that bitcoin theft happened means that hackers think bitcoin is valuable. Nobody robs banks anymore because fiat is worthless. Thieves only rob bitcoin because it is one of the most valuable asset in the world

Pirate was successfully prosecuted by the feds for the BTCST saga - which at its heart is about stealing bitcoin. That was a civil prosecution - so far. He has since been indicted on criminal charges.

i've had my bitcoins stolen from hackers and phishing numerous times and never once got them back :-(

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is one of the greatest things about bitcoins.  The stolen coins can be tracked and the spending of them will not lead them back to the thief.

Thats something that can definitely be done with fiat.

Mixing and exchanges basically wash em up and make them super hard to find.

I guess RodeoX should have specified stealing coins through security breaches. People gave their bitcoins to Pirate.

Under fraudulent circumstances, yes. If you want to play word games and tell me that such is not stealing, I'm not playing along. From a moral standpoint, I see absolutely no difference.

no, too difficult, but you can retrieve the starting address, but you would never know who used it

I think you can always use a service like bitmixer to make them untraceable.

Nope, one of the greatest things about bitcoin is FUNGIBILITY!

That depends on your jurisdiction and law enforcers' approach. If bitcoin is an asset, then buyer is likely to have his newly bought bitcoin seized.

Just like when you unknowingly buy a stolen car.

as someone mentioned here, you will never know if next address is owned by thief or new person which bought coins from him and didn't know they were stolen

Slightly off topic, but close none the less.  Is there a way to tell if 1 address is owned by the same wallet at all? 

i dont think so if you arent owner of it because it doesnt give any specific info about it

Well, if I'd be offered to buy some of the stolen BTC's from Bitstamp (for example) at half the current market price through a totally anonymous method such as "cash in the mail" or whatever method gives the most anonymity  (provided I'd trust the seller to send the btc or use trusted escrow services), even if I'd know 100% that those btc's are the stolen ones, I'd buy them. And I bet I'm not the only one without a high moral stance... I'm human after all, greed is part of my nature!

If you create a transaction with inputs from 2 addresses, the 2 addresses must be owned by the same person.

i think OP is looking for a cryptocurrency owned by someone. e.g. the government issues a DPOS cryptocurrency so they have authority over all transactions but at the same time the ledger is public.

that is not true, the person might have used something like a bitmixer so it cannot be certain who sent the bitcoins from the inputs

Bitcoin mixer doesn't have volume of 19k coins dude.

There're some cloud mining services that sell "freshly" mined bitcoins.
If the thief sells those coins to cloud mining service he'll get backgroundless bitcoins and Cloud service will distribute those stollen coins to the its users. So how will you track then?

edit: Those ponzi/cloud services mostly based on Russia (like HP) and they don't share any public info about themselves. If the thief is Russian; probably we won't be able to find him/her ;D

sure we can track them, but still, he's anonymous with only address :D
that's something good in bitcoin, but bad in the same time if you dont keep your coins safe :)

would be possible to create a system where every time you generate an address of BTC you have to identify?
for example, every time I go to create a BTC address, my ID is required. And if I do not identify me, the address is not created
it would be possible create a system to do that? or is possible but impractical

This is pretty good tool, just enter the address and it'll show you the wallet activity and all related active addresses:

http://www.walletexplorer.com/ (http://www.walletexplorer.com/)

The moment he makes up an account for a few exchange's with false info buys a shed load of nxt xmr xcp " paycoin 'lol' etc transfers them to another exchange cashes out if paranoid mixes, how on earth are you going to track him? surprised if you can still see a single coin now if you can he is a little nooby imo i would have had them clean spent on pot and stored coldwater in no time

It would be unethical and stealers can mix their coins.

That is not how the process of creating an address works. When you create an address, all you are doing is choosing a random number (out of a very large set of possible numbers) for your private key and then mathematically determine the bitcoin address from your private key. The bitcoin network is unaffected by this process. Many people create addresses without even being connected to the internet 

It is safer to create your address offline (on a computer that is not compromised)

In the US (I don't know about other countries), all paper money have unique serial numbers.  That means my $100 bill is different than your $100 bill. If someone stole my $100 bill, I can try to recover it by looking for the serial number. Somebody has my $100 bill, but I don't know who it is. If some body else came across the serial number that I'm looking for, I still don't know who the thief was.
Bitcoins have unique addresses. You don't know who owns it. If that address is used somewhere else, still no one knows who it used to belong to.

You have as many addresses as you want and you can mix your coins so you can be untraceable.

Anonymous coins? So much mystery, smells like the CIA?