You might also find this site useful:

http://bitcoinwatch.com/

Hahaha I don't have to launder money, but I'm inquiring out of general curiousity and before I advise a friend in India.

India has restrictions on sending any currency out of the country, something which bitcoin can obviously circumvent. That same friend is also interested in buying a domain anonymously and starting a blog for the purposes of whistleblowing.

If you step on enough toes and annoy enough people, the traceablity of everything, including your Internet connection and financial transactions, becomes a serious enough issue... 

Thanks for the reply nmat, I had a suspicion that it might be like that!

I like the idea of laundering bitcoins, and I guess a 5% commission is cheaper than what you'd pay in real life for similar services!

Will any of this change as time passes - i.e. as the logs of bitcoin transactions increase? I mean the same way that real money gets dirty after getting passed from hand to hand for years...

Depends on who/what your threat is, but sure there is!

You buy a cheap laptop, boot it with TAILS live CD (which surfs through Tor by default), change the MAC address, find an open Wi-Fi network, sit somewhere not covered by CCTV of any description (easy in Sweden, a bit harder in the UK) and voila!

Anonymous or pseudonymous transactions, on the other hand, are a bit more tricky, but far from impossible!

Hi,

I've been reading up on and trying to get my head around the public nature of bitcoin transactions...

So my question is this:

Say I wanted to make one particularly anonymous transaction. And I have 5 BTC on my account, which I obtained from an exchange.

What if I created three new addresses, and then sent the coins to myself (assuming I don't mind paying a 0.01 fee for each). I'd have 4.97 BTC left, on three separate addresses.

If I then proceed to make that particularly anonymous transaction, say 4.5 BTC, how traceable are the coins? Could someone figure out that they came from an exchange, then to my address(es)?

And furthermore, would that not make the exchange (by far the most common way people acquire bitcoins), and consequently the bank transaction you made to the exchange, the most vulnerable points of the whole system (given a determined and resourceful enough adversary)?

Thanks in advance!

Satya

Hi, I'm Satya

Love the idea of bitcoin, and I've jumped on the bandwagon eagerly! Tried mining for a while a few months ago, but figured out it would take forever, so I switched to exchanges instead