Bitcoin Forum

According to this post: https://beta.sam.gov/opp/f11c3e2445d94c429dbcce7019cc91d1/view?keywords=%22smart%20contract%22&sort=-relevance&index=&is_active=true&page=1


And they are probably looking to buy some smart contract or blockchain analysis tool to help them track those illegal activities (non-registration) or even more. Obviously, they want to follow every trail specially for big companies involved like exchanges.

Boring.

BTW:They should take a look at winK.

What do you expect? for all we know, not only SEC but other agencies, specially IRS, in 2018 IRS Wants to Tax Your Bitcoin Gains: Orders Coinbase to Hand Over User Data (https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-tax-looms-irs-orders-coinbase-turn-over-user-data/). And then this year, RS Enlists Coinbase in Latest Crypto Tracing Deal (https://www.coindesk.com/irs-enlists-coinbase-in-latest-crypto-tracing-deal). Perhaps what SEC want's is that they have their own tools, and it doesn't sound good.

Well, it´s getting closer to stock trading system, where you also have your clearing houses that need to confirm a trade. Beside that, governments today have a tendendy, or call it a paranoia if you will, to controll everryting, so this is no big news. A big impact would be a commonly accepted approach for the regulation of cryptos across all 50 states.

It is becoming more intense now. Anyone who has one way or the other lost his/her crypto to the scammer will support the intentions of the SEC maybe one day it will be possible for them to help recover stolen assets. Meanwhile, a regular crypto enthusiast will see it as a means of getting to know too much and probably will end up in further regulation of crypto assets but the real question is what exactly we really want.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, crypto is easily trackable and there are plenty of companies out there providing tools for that. Even mixers can be decoded and funds traced. This is the thing that many dont understand, they have this fantasy that crypto is anonymous and not traceable but in reality most of the time it is much easier to track crypto than bank transfers.

They wanted to be closer to guard and track portfolios. I am having a feeling that they are after the defi projects who are working on smart contract. If they are finding ways on how to monitor the transactions happening on the defi bonding sales they needed tools. Looks like earlier than expected. That they are highly suspicious of this process.

Just by number or set of address? There is no information divuldge on transaction record, how come this will be easier to track compared to banks that your name and address is a must to fill in.

They can just force any exchange and wallets that wants to operate in United States to give a complete log of user data and their crypto balances, transactions and behaviors. Most of the user at some time do use a centralized wallet and exchange. Once, they get the transaction, they can keep on tracking till they find another wallet on their database tracking whole of the chain. The supercomputers do need some job.

Yeah, I'm sure they're looking to track just these "illegal activites" and not the ordinary people's wallets and private lives.. I can't imagine what a pain in the arse it'll be once they'll have proper control & analysis tools and start questioning people's transactions. I wish it was true and they spent all their resources to find illegal activities on the chain but I'm quite sure that won't be the case.

ETH, EOS,TRON ???  

I was very sorry, but a year ago I said goodbye to the last American crypto exchange.
First, all American exchanges will be forced to leak all personal data of customers, and then other major global exchanges.
This will increase the burden on banks, increase the number of Bank account blocking and tax penalties, and have the opposite economic effect - the shadow sector will grow.

I can't open the link for some reason. Here's an alternative source for those of you who are looking https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-looking-to-buy-a-blockchain-forensics-tool-that-analyzes-smart-contracts/

If you read the article I shared above, it's mentioned there that SEC is indeed after this multi-billion-dollar decentralized finance (Defi) industry. They are done with ICOs/IEOs or other forms of token sales and they want to focus on the next thing in crypto which happen to be DeFi.

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I also stumbled upon an earlier request for tools to track cryptocurrency transactions. It's not from the SEC, it's from the US Army. - US Army Requests Information on Tools to Track Cryptocurrency Transactions (https://news.bitcoin.com/us-army-tools-track-cryptocurrency-transactions/)

If they can build up an effective and productive tool to automatically track crypto (bitcoin first) transactions to owners, IPs, etc. they will do this for all bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin block data is available for all of us and it only requires advanced skills from tech gurus to dig deeper to find more things that can be supported by their own bitcoin full nodes.

You can get data at Blockchair.com's database dump (https://blockchair.com/dumps#database)

From bitcoin, people can mix it or convert it to other altcoins, then mix again, and any kind of things they think will protect their privacy. But it is what people thought, try to mix with some cryptocurrencies won't protect their privacy if they don't do it right.

[Guide] Decent mixing methods (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5146241.0)

Yes, there are other companies providing that tool, but if you read the link, it seems that they are looking to have their own tool, for whatever reasons it is. But we all know that as crypto enthusiast, they want to trace everything.

It's going to be difficult to track if you just put your assets in let's say a bitcoin wallet. There's no way that you can trace it if it is not going to be moved in a centralised exchange.

And I still remember this: Thinking of adding 'Blockchain' to your company name? SEC is watching you (https://www.zdnet.com/article/thinking-of-adding-blockchain-to-your-company-name-sec-is-watching-you/)

The problem is the way they try to take these advanced skills and use them against our own privacy. Like, it's taking a very smooth focus turn from criminals to literally everyone else.

I usually throw away all unnecessary physical information about my wallets such as paper wallets the same way I throw away unnecessary bills when paying with fiat anywhere - which basically means that, while there's a permanent record on the Blockchain of all my txs, there's no way even I can link txs from months/years ago to the real events during which I have broadcasted them.

Through this crypto tracking tool, they'd probably get to a point where addresses their tool won't have any clue about will be flagged as a "suspicious" - as in, sources of funds are unknown. What is quite creepy is that, by the effort of "improving compliance", they're doing exactly the opposite of what mixers do - does this mean crypto privacy will become an enemy of the state? The blockchain is publicly available, but in order to analyze or track cryptocurrency addresses, you have to spend quite a lot of resources the average Joe doesn't have.

There is nothing surprising. Government agencies will always try to take control of the cryptocurrency and impose their own rules for its circulation in society. They will also try to track the movements of the cryptocurrency and at the same time establish its belonging to specific individuals. It seems that there will always be a confrontation between government agencies and anonymity in cryptocurrency.

SEC is indeed after these defi projects, with the use of crypto tracking tool, suspicious transactions are hoped to be traced.
Although, block chain records are publicly accessible, I still think that in order to track everything violation of privacy may happen.
And I believe that this proposition would cost intensive effort and determination.

High chances they are true to themselves going after for the huge transactions. You know that it could be dangerous since it can be used to supply funds for illefal activities like terrorism. The intel should double efforts on securing nations from the risk that may arise. It will be a great disaster if this terrorist will get a good sources from other terrorist groups and keeping their alliance against their common enemy. I hope so it will not going to happen. Pretty sure that this covid19 could be a man made or natural disaster. We should always be careful and ready for possible things to happen.

This doesn't surprise me. And I don't think we should react harshly to that. After all, the transactions are publicly available for anyone out there wanting to have a look, so I don't think it can be reasonably argued that the authorities should not use that to look into things they're interested it. Moreover, tracking is likely to be used for the cases of known scams. It's often known that the scammers who hacked an exchange or something like that have transferred money to a certain address. So I support authorities trying to find a solution that would allow to track where such money goes and seek a moment of mistake that gives information about the identity of these scammers. It would be worse if SEC argued for 100% of users going through KYC so that in case someone commits a crime it would be easy to know who it was.

But this is somehow absurd, because cryptocurrencies are already traceable, they could just take a loot at the network where and when a transaction has been made. The thing they want is quite bothering, they want a degree of tracking system that will make them an all-eye for everyone especially on the exchanges. This is how the other governments deal with the cryptocurrency, hiding behind "we're protecting you from scam and frauds" , they are in advantage of this.

  Yeah, and one day after you send million funds to someone they don't know they will just go to your house, lots of police outside, chopper in the air, and calling you via megaphone  ;D

If a tracker like this has come. Frauds and other crypto criminals will be eliminated and the crypto currency will surely be having a peaceful life. When crypto world is already in peace, mass adoption will easily occur and it is sooner than what we've expected. I hope that may happen because we all know that crypto currency mass adoption can help the whole world's financial system better and if something like that happens, there will be no rich and poor country.

SEC want to control and track everything as usual

I wish the SEC good luck. Technologies is changing faster than regulators can keep up.

Lol, well we know that the government was left behind with the technology tha other private sectors had. They only will just react when it is new to them like cryptocurrency. This is why keeping in tract with the new technology make it more hard for the government. However, i think it is still manageable at the moment and the government could still coup up with it. They had the resources available and they can also tap the private sectors for a help im regards to cryptocurrency tracking tool.

When government regulate something, it would give them a freedom to closely monitor and track it, even in crypto, they can do as they have the power and resources to do it. Even the mixers that we enjoy now on hiding our transactions either legal or illegal might be gone in the future.

The government does not only have the power to track, they also have the power to deemed something illegal when it's impossible for them to track it.

This is the logical step, if we like it or not. Cryptocurrencies develope all the time becoming more and more accepted and governments have the need to keep that under control. That doesn't necessary have to be wrong as long as doesn't supress the freedom but is aimed against misuse and illegal activities, then it's for the benefit of all users. However, let's wait and see how successful this is going to be.

Hehehe, well I would agree, this is going to be an evolving technology and it will be race as to who are going to be on top until something comes up to out maneuver the other side. Can SEC keep up with the race? Who or what company are going to step up and do the "dirty task" for them? Of course, centralised exchange can be pressured to give up everything on SEC. But still a lot of work for them. Let's see how everything will pan out.

It sounds bad to me what the SEC wants, as many people think the government wants to control everything.Cryptocurrencies are no exception,
I am not surprised by this news. Indeed, sooner or later the government will take this action. If the SEC manages to get the tools to track crypto,
there will be no more freedom in crypto transactions. Because of all transactions is under government supervision.

This could have a good side to it too. For example regulation in the stock market is the reason why pump and dump is not always possible to such an extent that it becomes a eye sore. This happens a lot in crypto - like every other day you can find 400% gains on a certain shitcoin that you never heard of.

Again the money laundering and criminal money hopping issues is also there which need to controlled. Of course the fear that people have that legitimate users are going to fall in trouble is less because the regulators know that legit users exist and thus they make their systems in such a manner that such users are not punished but criminals are detected. That way many scammers are hackers could be brought to punishment since crypto has become a safer haven for them than fiat.

IMO, this can be a new step in crypto if it is realized in the proper manner.

The fact is :
The already have enough tools to track the cryptocurrencies and transactions and with the KYC enabled wallets it's more easier than ever .

What they actually need to do is :
-To get some crypto enthusiasts working with them
-Keep in mind the thin line between Centralization and helping the community to track these behavior

Problem is :
They have to first state how they will go on about tracking the illegal activities ?? They would essentially have to track everyone , literally Everyone then join the dots.

The thing is this way it will be nothing but a highly controlled cryptocurrency which would totally kill the whole idea of privacy.

I do think they have to stay away from the cryptocurrencies for a while since only 10% of Bitcoins is involved in the illegal activities and for this the privacy of rest 90% should not be compromised.

     Well, things like these are already to be expected since we already have know for a very long time that ever since bitcoin made a huge wave and got noticed, big people and most governments wanted to have control over bitcoins and everything related to it. The big people wants to stay in control. Security has been used a reason way too much and they are taking advantage of this reason. This may sound as something out of a movie but it's true enough that lots of people are slowly realizing it. This is my take on everything happening today. Not just in this industry alone.

They just want to track everyone so they could know who would they tax on crypto industry.
They now want to tax everyone and everything seem's like we would soon be seeing more tax on our hand.
I also read that here in the Philippines vlogger or youtuber would be taxed as well.

Probably, the main thing is to monitor every movement from this industry and see where they can get the money in terms of taxes.


Expect that to happen as they are really looking for additional resources to gain more taxes, crypto space won't escape that realities.


Everything that money concern, government will be there to tail them up.

One common reason for SEC in doing this is because investors are now turning into cryptocurrency, blockchain and DeFi space, in which taxing them would be a challenge due to the market condition. On top of that, token sales are having some lack of regulation in which more and more scammers are easily exit scamming the hard-earned money of investors.

I honestly that it does make sense for them to acquire more tools in tracking down our digital assets. It's still a challenge for them until now, despite they've restricted token sales in the United States.

If it's for the busting illegal activities like money laundering, etc. Then SEC is doing the right thing. However, it's too hard to find such tools that may eventually track all the crypto transactions. It may take time before they may find and formulate one. Or maybe if they will prioritize those who have huge transactions to track down where those crypto coins are using, they may find a way to determined such events. Hopefully, SEC will find such tool so people won't be taking advantage of cryptocurrency's good reputation.

On July 29, the day prior to the notice’s publication, the SEC put out a notice saying that it intended to award blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace a contract to help it track the flow of funds on blockchains.

In its notice, it said that CipherTrace’s products are “the only known blockchain forensics and risk intelligence tool that can support the Binance coin (BNB) and all tokens on the Binance network.”

The SEC said that the government would “give consideration to interested parties” if they put their submissions in by “the response date of the notice,” which was...a day later, July 30.

That should actually they do, in the first place but that is very challenging for them to track this kind of environment knowing that scammer, hackers, and some sort of illegalities will use coin mixers just to keep them anonymously.

I believe the SEC don't just need only new tools to track these sort of activities but ovbiously they need the community to act as reportet once they notice this kind of scheme. But somehow I appreciate how they work with this new challenge, their role in minimizing illegalities is very important and that they need to act immediately.

I think they can track most crypto transactions right now, can't they?

We thought SEC was going to help us during the long bearish market as they kept postponing and rejecting various bitcoin ETF, today we don't even care about them anymore and the boom the market is doing much better. We don't want SEC anymore, tell them to leave the people alone.

As time goes on, the government will be coming into the Blockchain and cryptocurrency, and before you know what’s happening there would be full regulation of the market. Someone once said to me that people think that cryptocurrency and Blockchain is out of reach for the government, but we are forgetting that these things are technologies that were created by people like us, and majority of them are now working for the government in different agencies and will be helping the government to track cryptocurrency users and other things. Anything that’s built by a man, no matter how strong it seems to be, there will always be a means to break it down if they want to.

I just hope that they don’t ruin everything someday. I do understand that the reason why they are doing this is so that they can keep people safe and it will be easy for them to trace people who are making use of cryptocurrency for bad purposes. This is part of why I never bother myself about anonymity.

The SEC is a government agency doing their job of protecting the people. Every government want to know the finances of it's citizens for purposes of tax and other regulations so it is not out of play to see the agency making inroads into tracking crypto.

That's their job and they are doing the right thing and I just hope that they will succeed with their intent to control illegalities in using crypto by having these tools. Because it is to believe that they could hardly find it and get into an effective tool that will likely help them. Because they are not in control of the crypto market, not a thing that they could regulate everything in here. Scamming and other illegal activities won't that easy to stop as people will find a way unnoticed.

Seems like some people here got surprised into this manner which it isnt really something new for government on trying to trace up everything.They would like to know everything on what you do and what
are the things you've owned and all related stuff.

Reasons on why they do hate crypto generally because they cant able to trace up everything thats why it isnt surprising that they would do their best on making sorts of ways just to make something that can be
traced specially here on crypto.

This doesnt sound good yet we know on what are the companies will surely be targeted out but im bit sure that this would take for some time or would end up for them to fail.

I'm not sure they can do that, millions of addresses can be generated as one person can generate more than one address and can even make more wallets of his own. There's no tool to monitor all these transactions, what the government needs to monitor is the destination of these btc from wallets when they use to transact, and that is the businesses that they regulate, such as exchanges, online stores, ect.. and also those that they can't regulate which is the mixers or tumblers, I just don't know how they'll do that.

if thats thier mission then i wont hesitate to support it  . i do hate ilegal activities because i was a victim before  .

 we guys dont need to worry as long we are doing legal transactions we will be fine . this is the same as government put chips and tracking device on our gadgets and the purpose is for our own good to . when we lost those gadget or it has been stole , we can easily hunt the suspect .

The problem is they can't track everyone, that's why there's a law because if this is not followed, we will go to jail.
Tracking is not most likely for tax purposes, but to determine if you are doing legal or illegal activities using bitcoin, and that's another hell of a job.


This isn't related, this is a crypto news, digital currencies or online job, whatsoever, does not automatically relate to crypto, and they have different kind of law being implemented.

Everywhere it is for the reason of taxation. With the user data being provided, governments easily keep track of the transactions, and this ease the process. In specific, better than the traditional money taxation can be done effectively. The job defined for SEC is to have a processed plan, so that it'll ease the risk for people as well as benefit the governments. The reality is that we can't trust the government for several reasons. :D

I don't know why SEC is wasting their time and resources just to find tools to track cryptocurrency transactions when the framework of crypto transactions is decentralized. There are a lot of illegal acts and money laundering happening in the so called best financial system (the centralized system) and the SEC is there wasting unnecessary resources on an innocent blockchain system.  They are not gonna be successful tracking crypto, simply because there are more than millions of miners managing the transactions of the blockchain activities.

Finally, the government decided to get involved further with many illegal activities in cryptocurrency. And through the SEC intend
to track crypto transactions, with today's increasingly rapid technological advances allowing the SEC to find tools to track crypto.
Since the SEC's job as a government agency is like the IRS to protect citizens, it's no wonder it's decided to track crypto.Although
this sounds bad for some of the crypto community, because they don't want the government to control blockchain and cryptocurrency
like the government controls the banks in the real world.

Indeed. That's why Bitcoin is not affiliated and regulated by the government because for sure it will be just for their benefit, mostly. But for the purpose of stopping of illegal activities here, it is just fine.

Of course technologies are changing, but in terms of cryptocurrencies, even if another cryptocurrency that is better than Bitcoin should be released, people will still be using Bitcoin because that is what they prefer, and Bitcoin is more easy to trace than others. When politicians and officials of such a regulatory authorities understand about bitcoins, then they might be approving bitcoin for ETF.


With my small knowledge on bitcoin and crypto space's core concepts, I believe only transactions are traceable and not the mapping of addresses to individuals/corporate. So, I'm not sure what kind of tool, those SEC people are actually looking for.

They will catch up to the technology. If transactions is traceable then they are going ot make sure they are going make use of this blockchain properties. IRS will also be tracing and if the exchanges will handout the accoutns details to them, its likely that we are going to see jail time for some of us.

Its the times like we want transparency for all and now that government will use this transparency we are about to flee away  ;D

This is definitely not surprising.  The governments of the world are always going to try and control things that have nothing to do with them ( or monitor them ).  This is nothing, just wait until steve mnuchin secretary of treasury comes out with his crypto "guidelines".

But unfortunately, they never win over illegalities and much more challenging this time if they'll use coin mixers.

I'm looking forward to the success of their hunts toward illegalities and have it supported. I know it won't be easy for them to track it all illegal transactions, they can't get them all as I know but having this tool will help it to minimize.

I hope also to have fair crypto guidelines.

Government agencies are interested in tracking everything under the sun lol. You said they are doing for them to be able to track bigger exchanges? If it’s for exchanges, some might say that there is no problem with that, but there’s still problem. When they start to tackle exchanges, that means the exchanges will give way for them to come in and be monitoring everything that we are all doing on the Blockchain. They might start first with exchanges as a way to take control. I don’t really know about decentralized exchanges and how it’s going to be.

I think it is astounding. Government organizations will always attempt to require control of the cryptocurrency and force their claim rules for its circulation in society. They will moreover attempt to track the developments of the cryptocurrency and at the same time build up its having a place to particular people. It appears that there will continuously be a encounter between government organizations and namelessness in cryptocurrency.