Girl gets raided by police looking for bitcoins

[crazyivan]

This is 99% BS. Bunch of cops raiding a house over 12.5k euros in Germany? It s just too fishy. BTW, what kind of law did she break?

[Pursuer]

well from what I know a police "raid" doesn't happen just because someone transferred some euros around or has bitcoin. if that were the case we had a similar news every day since a lot of people have a lot more bitcoin and move it around, mostly in and out of exchanges when they trade. you can even see it on kraken volumes!

this is most probably what others have also said: Drug related. she must have done some shady stuff in dark market and got caught. simple as that.

[cellard]

And Coinbase happen to be the biggest one.
Please think, in the future, this will be the norm. All major service providers are going to end up like this, it's only a matter of time the government throws endless resources into blockchain analysis linking it all to all possible gateways like exchanges in order to catch everyone that is unlucky to be holding coins that are traced back to criminal activities.
The *only* way to counteract it is to make it impossible by improving bitcoin privacy at its core.

How do you suggest to improve the privacy of bitcoin when you can monitor everything ,the government will come up with solutions to identify major players in the bitcoin echo system in the future without a doubt,until then everyone is free to trade without any restriction.It is really unfortunate to see police knocking at doors just for handling bitcoin,if that is the case.

You don't wait "until then". That is a recipe for disaster. You get ready before things happen. And im certain governments will only get increasingly tyrannical as BTC reaches $10,000 and starts challenging gold as a solid store of value outside of the system. I count on the likes of gmaxwell and others that understand the importance of privacy, to keep thinking about innovative ways to obscure bitcoin transactions (ideally at protocol level)

Definitely something to look into, I don't want to seem like a shill but it definitely looks like going through a mixer is a good idea and it'll only be a better and better idea as time drags on. The more you can obscure your funds the better I'd say.
It's almost depressing to see how aggressive governments get when you get outside of their system and start to use things not directly under their control. Either way, we have interesting times ahead of us.

But you are missing my point. No matter how much you mix coins, you don't know if the coins you are going to end up with, will have a criminal origin or not. Mixing coins is good to stop a trace of someone already knowing that it's you who is receiving the coins, but it is useless when it comes to protecting yourself from the bad luck lottery of ending up with tainted "criminal coins".

There's no way out but to obscure the entire blockchain somehow and I have no idea how this could be done.

[Xester]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/68nh7q/knock_knock_police_you_have_bitcoins/

I think this deserves it's own thread, and it shows how much we need Confidential Transactions, CoinJoin, Schnorr sigs, Mimblewimble, and whatever else we can do to improve fungibility of bitcoin.

The fear of ending up in trouble due owning BTC that may have been connected to criminal activity in the past is a very reasonable concern.

How do we solve this? Tone Vays already said that he is pretty scared to sell his BTC because he doesn't know if he is going to end up having problems.

What is the reason why the girl was raided by just looking for bitcoins. In my line of thought there was something behind the girls actions that made the police to take action and arrest her. Possibly she is involved in some criminal activity and bitcoin was only dragged into the picture since the woman being arrested was at the moment looking or owns a bitcoin.

[BTCLovingDude]

...
But you are missing my point. No matter how much you mix coins, you don't know if the coins you are going to end up with, will have a criminal origin or not. Mixing coins is good to stop a trace of someone already knowing that it's you who is receiving the coins, but it is useless when it comes to protecting yourself from the bad luck lottery of ending up with tainted "criminal coins".

There's no way out but to obscure the entire blockchain somehow and I have no idea how this could be done.

a proper mixer won't just give you the coins they got from someone else, that would be stupid!
what happens is that when you make a deposit in a bitcoin address that a mixer gives you that money goes into a pool. pool of all the bitcoins they received and it gets mixed, there should be a lot of transactions in this and then your "literary mixed coins" come out from a new transaction to another person.
and it would be extremely hard and nearly impossible to prove these coins were ever used for whatever reason they were used for before

[Glutinous Treat]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/68nh7q/knock_knock_police_you_have_bitcoins/

I think this deserves it's own thread, and it shows how much we need Confidential Transactions, CoinJoin, Schnorr sigs, Mimblewimble, and whatever else we can do to improve fungibility of bitcoin.

The fear of ending up in trouble due owning BTC that may have been connected to criminal activity in the past is a very reasonable concern.

How do we solve this? Tone Vays already said that he is pretty scared to sell his BTC because he doesn't know if he is going to end up having problems.

What is the reason why the girl was raided by just looking for bitcoins. In my line of thought there was something behind the girls actions that made the police to take action and arrest her. Possibly she is involved in some criminal activity and bitcoin was only dragged into the picture since the woman being arrested was at the moment looking or owns a bitcoin.

Already a "person of interest"?

[cellard]

I found this lecture of gmaxwell on confidential transactions, I haven't seen it entirely but I will look at it later. Seems relevant to this thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHPYNZ8i1cU

This is the kind of stuff we need immediately. Improving bitcoin fungibility should be a top priority, ideally in ways that don't require segwit since miners are going to keep blocking it. Btw gmaxwell mentions how he is happy for LTC getting segwit and will work there since working in LN stuff without segwit is a waste of time.

Hopefully sooner or later we get segwit in BTC too somehow.

[Emoclaw]

The original reddit post is deleted, all the more confirming what I and several other people said. Police had valid reason to do what they did.

[Carlton Banks]

The original reddit post is deleted, all the more confirming what I and several other people said. Police had valid reason to do what they did.

Way to go, punching down, Mr. Righteous Indignation. There is no such thing as universal morality

If your house got raided for basically "being that Bitcoin person", guess what some people with different moral values to you would say? "The police had every right to raid Emoclaw the way they did, these Bitcoiners make me sick"

[jbreher]

Even in the US, you need a license, if you trade above $12,500 in Bitcoins.

Almost true. You need a business license if you 'are engaged in the business of transacting bitcoins'. Is there a dollar amount threshold? No. That threshold is for the prosecutor and your lawyer to argue over. In court. After you have been arrested, and jailed. And after you have spent large sums of money trying to defend your innocence.

[jbreher]

well from what I know a police "raid" doesn't happen just because someone transferred some euros around or has bitcoin

Well then what you know is bunk. Sometimes, raids _do_ just happen because bitcoin. Because the investigators can't discover any other reason, and they (think they) 'know' that bitcoin has no legitimate use.

Of course, we don't know the real story for this case, but we do for others. Some of which fully illustrate my point.

[iluvpie60]

Very troubling to say the least. People should not eorry ablut this largely though. There is more to this story than meets the eye. Seems like she had a big transaction and thats what did it in germany.

[btcforall777]

All I know is that they will never find my bitcoins! between dash, zec and bitmixer good luck. And I am totally legal

[avikz]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/68nh7q/knock_knock_police_you_have_bitcoins/

I think this deserves it's own thread, and it shows how much we need Confidential Transactions, CoinJoin, Schnorr sigs, Mimblewimble, and whatever else we can do to improve fungibility of bitcoin.

The fear of ending up in trouble due owning BTC that may have been connected to criminal activity in the past is a very reasonable concern.

How do we solve this? Tone Vays already said that he is pretty scared to sell his BTC because he doesn't know if he is going to end up having problems.

The main post is now deleted so I couldn't read it. However, I read the first comment on this thread and what I understood that the story has been misinterpreted. However, many countries are not clear with the bitcoin's legal status. Some governments don't bother and some are still thinking. So it is not unusual to have enforcement agencies to crack down big transactions which is not suitable with someone's financial situation.

If someone from my country did such transaction, may be the government did the same thing. But it's unfortunate to know about such incidents because we all are trying to make decent living with our extra income in bitcoin and probably saving for the future.

[leopard2]

Even in the US, you need a license, if you trade above $12,500 in Bitcoins.

Almost true. You need a business license if you 'are engaged in the business of transacting bitcoins'. Is there a dollar amount threshold? No. That threshold is for the prosecutor and your lawyer to argue over. In court. After you have been arrested, and jailed. And after you have spent large sums of money trying to defend your innocence.

The key thing here is that in Germany police can legally do fishing expeditions and in the US they can not.

There is no such thing as "fruit from a poisoned tree" principle in German law.

For other assets (cars, gold, whatever), there is a 15000 EUR daily limit for businesses. Over 14999.99, KYC has to be performed. For private transactions there is no limit. If a top court will consider Bitcoin sales money transmission, is very questionable. There is no law that says, BTC are money - Gold is not. It is all arbitrary at the moment.

And due to that, they do fishing expeditions and try to scare people, which is disgusting and vile. 

This is why Localbitcoins does not operate in Germany. It would take them 10 years to take a case up to the highest court and they said "Too much effort...we leave the Stalinist dirthole alone"

[jaberwock]

This post is locked. You won't be able to comment.

also the OP has been deleted

has anyone saved the post?