Bitcoin Forum

How anonymous are BTCs and transactions.
I work for a payment network, and we've been seeing more and more fraudulent transactions of customers accounts being compromised and purchasing Bitcoins with stolen dollars.

I know you can see of the transaction information from blockchain, but i'm guessing there is nothing logged by IP address or browser agent information anywhere.

Essentially what would be interesting is to see the wallet that was funded and work backwards to see if they were receiving any other payments from BTC sellers.

Not in a blockchain but every node can keep record of IP they received the transaction

Blockchain.info shows the IP of relayed transaction - doesnt need to be sender but it might be

hmmmm...interesting.  Thanks for this.  I'll have to look into this a little more.

Let's clear that:
The IP you see is just the one who relayed the transaction, every node relay all transactions. Nothing more nothing less. It DO NOT help you in identifying who made the transaction.

Blockchain.info is connected to about 1000 nodes. There is some chance Blockchain.info is connected directly to sender

Most people use a coin mixer to mix their coins to make them pretty much untraceable in the Blockchain.

I used http://www.bitcoinfog.com and looked into blockchain, how mixing looks like..
Service has a very good ratings over here, I personally did not lose any coin, except service fee (1-3 percent random)
(just a newbie post...)

For average user Bitcoin is not anonymous at all.

For paranoid user Bitcoin might be anonymous, if he does all right

Could you elaborate a little bit more for me, a new bitcoiner?  :P

It's as anonymous as you make it. 

If you use best practices, your identity never has to be tied to an address.

If you don't, you're identify will always be tied to your address and all your transactions will always be traceable by anyone.

Look up OPSEC best practices and read about Ross Ulbrichts failures -- it is tome of failures from which to learn from.

Bitcoin is as anon as cash which depending on circumstances could be a little or a lot.

Not really, cash in hand transactions are not recorded unlike Bitcoin.

Recorded are only if you get these from banks or ATM. The longer the cash is out of bank or ATM, the harder it is to track.

Confusing anonymity with privacy.  No transaction between two people is anonymous since the other person knows and can tell others about you.  If you go to your bank get some cash and go to the corner to score some weed it is exactly the same as you going to coinbase buy some BTC and go to the corner and use the BTC to score some weed.  So BTC is as anonymous as cash.  You can do some things to increase your privacy level like mixing coins and not storing wallets on your computer which is basically the equivalent of not keeping records of your cash transactions.

I dont worry about anonymity of my coins, it is not important for me at all. Fortunately most users fail to this category I guess, because just using Bitcoin-qt + exchanges = no anonymity

how efficient does the tumbler on blockchain work? how easily can they trade or track your coins from block chain!

All coins are traceable on the blockchain.  What you are doing with mixing is trying to make it a bit harder to link your individual coin movements.

Yup, exactly...what I was trying to figure out is how can identify the portion of between 'the bank' and the 'wallet'.  Essentially we know the 'bank' side of that transaction, but what need to identify is the wallet, and see if there are any other transactions coming from the same 'bank' to that wallet.  The easiest way is probably going to 'the bank' an working with them to try and help us identify the suspicious wallets.

The only truly untraceable coins are ones that were mined by yourself.

The first node to broadcast a transaction is probably the one where it was made. You can try to link its IP to a person, but how are you going to do that and what if they used Tor? I guess you're out of luck then

my understanding was that bitcoins were all untracable and that was what was so hard to take silkroad down about?

We get a device fingerprint for all transactions that occur on the network, so we can see everything about an from what IP/Proxy they are using, to what version of flash, browser they have.  If they are using Tor it makes it a bit more challenging, but at least we can see the IP address that is assigned and look that way

I am not sure that's going to help you. What IP do you log specifically? The local IP is useless (99% NAT, etc.), the Tor exit point IP effectively masks the guy unless you're 3 NSAs. An IP obtained via an external service a la whatismyip is also going to give you the Tor exit node, is it not?
All in all, I feel like your best course of action would be to track fraudsters like you're already doing and try to stop them when they show up again, ban them or something of the sort.
Then again if they know what they're doing, your evercookie, digital fingerprint or what have you will not work properly either.
Just trying to throw out some ideas here, not trying to bash your operation or anything :)

haha, I agree 100%.  In general, the IP address is essentially useless to since everyone is using dynamic IPs, Tor, or something program to prevent us from doing anything with IP.  And yes, everything we get would be the Tor Exit node.  There really isn't much we can do, but our 'evercookie' does provide some good intelligence if it is the same device performing the same fraud, which we can then shutdown and prevent from doing further transactions.

Still your provider knows what IP was used in what time. So you can find people and IP is sufficient

If you are connecting to a VPN/proxy they cannot tell the difference between the million other connections you have going on unless they did a full blown investigation on every single IP/port/etc you connected to.

Just going to a web page full of ads spits out 10+ IP connections.

If you setup your own proxy system its even more difficult.

You could also setup VMWARE on your pc if you are worry about being identified with other tricks, go to McDonalds use that Wifi.. Go to a hotel.. Go to a nieborhood full of WiFi connections..

So many ways to make you anonymous but Bitcoin by itself isn't anonymous.

I have a theory that one day we will all be assigned an IP (like SSN only on a global scale) similar to how they assign IPs for servers.

Basically if you don't have an IP you cannot get on the internet and everything you do with this IP is forever recorded. No proxy systems will exist and the only way to "proxy" yourself would be using someones IP which then would essentially be like identity theft/borrowing.

This would solve endless problems in the web hosting world, but right now no one will accept it.

And who would run this world wide IP/SSN database?

IANA in collaboration with the local government?

exstasie, an user can create as many BTC addresses as they wen, each new address, once used is visible on the public block chat, and all its transactions are also completely visible.