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Seth Simmons Profile picture
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28 Apr, 10 tweets, 2 min read
1/ Wired gets it:

wired.com/story/bitcoin-…

Tl;dr — Mixing service operator arrested for money laundering (while banks/bankers go free for worse versions) because of a 10y old Bitcoin transaction being traced.
2/ “This is yet another example of how investigators with the right tools can leverage the transparency of cryptocurrency to follow the flow of illicit funds.”

Investigators and governments are quickly learning to *love* #Bitcoin for it’s transparency.
3/ The operator used methods that at the time were supposedly private, but the permanent record of Bitcoin allowed those attempts to be traced later on.

Those methods were sufficient at the time but failed later due to tracing research.
4/ “With blockchain analytics the thing we say over and over is that all this activity is on this ledger forever, and if you did something bad 10 years ago you can be caught and arrested for it today.”

Bitcoin TXs today are a surveillance nightmare, stored forever.
5/ Even using advanced tools for privacy on Bitcoin today could become unmasked and broken later, exposing TX history for all time.

Important to remember the immutability of Bitcoin and the negative that that is for privacy as research on tracing improves over time.
6/ “The case shows yet another example of how Bitcoin, once widely believed to be a powerful tool for making anonymous, untraceable transactions, has turned out to be in many cases the very opposite.”
7/ “The blockchain's ledger of all Bitcoin transactions since the cryptocurrency's creation has often instead served as a means for law enforcement to trace even years-old transactions.”
8/ The things you do on Bitcoin today, even if legal today, could come back to haunt you in years or decades as laws, governments, and regimes shift.

Don’t take that risk.
9/ Use #Monero or go to jail.

This phrase will age well and only become more potent.
Great thread on the non-Bitcoin sources used for the investigation and how… shady the use of those was:

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More from @sethisimmons

Seth Simmons Profile picture
25 Apr
1/ A short thread on mistakes I’ve made along the way that (hopefully) other’s can learn from before they fall into the same traps:

Please don’t laugh at me 😂

P.S. — these are in no particular order.
2/ Trusting that Bitcoin is anonymous by default.

This one is common, but I still dread the trail I’ve most definitely left behind in my early days for all time.

Thankfully I’ve found people in Bitcoin that provide good advice and options, but early on I had no idea.
3/ Believing and buying whatever is shilled the most.

I may or may not have put substantial money into VeChain and Litecoin early on before realizing the drawbacks and issues that come with them.
Read 13 tweets
Seth Simmons Profile picture
19 Apr
From 34:00 to 47:00 is quite possibly the best primer and discussion on fungibility I've ever heard.

Thanks for such an open and clear discussion on such an important topic, @PeterMcCormack!
If you'd like to chat more about fungibility from a neutral perspective I would love to jump on WBD and have an open and honest discussion.

No Monero shilling.
Clearly laying out tradeoffs of each approach to privacy.

What do you say, @PeterMcCormack?
The best thing for the world would be that Bitcoin wakes up to the threat of a lack of fungibility and takes the steps necessary to protect fungibility and the privacy of its users.

Raising awareness is a huge step towards that, and WBD334 was an awesome beginning.
Read 4 tweets
Seth Simmons Profile picture
19 Apr
$207 in fees for a reasonably private spend, LN vulnerable to theft and fund locking attacks due to high fees, and the simplest of transactions costing $16 in fees.

Don’t embrace fee spikes caused by poor design and mining centralization.

Find a better tool.
Fees are only necessary at a very low level for spam prevention — the real reason Bitcoin needs fees to “pump forever” is because the narrative of a hard-cap has made network security 100% reliant on fees long-term.

Tail emission is an elegant solution:

localmonero.co/knowledge/mone…
If you’re currently struggling with Bitcoin’s usability there is an incredible tool waiting for you.

It’s called #Monero, and you can transact for $0.0248 in fees while protecting both your privacy and that of the recipient, with no extra hoops to jump through.
Read 4 tweets
Seth Simmons Profile picture
19 Apr
1/ I’ve finally been able to put together a new blog post to celebrate the growth in #Monero in the past year:

sethsimmons.me/posts/this-yea…

Take a look below for some highlights, and at the full post for all the awesome details (and charts!).
2/ One of the most important ways we can deduce what has been happening in Monero is to look at the (thankfully, sparse) blockchain data available publicly.

Let’s start diving into the data:
3/ Transactions:

Monero went from ~10,000TX per day to ~23,000TX per day 👀

There were 5,868,096 total TXs, for an average of 16,076TX per day for the year

Monero’s on-chain usage via private-by-default transactions that protect sender, receiver, and amounts, grew 208% YoY!
Read 12 tweets
Seth Simmons Profile picture
13 Apr
1/ In the latest twist to this odd situation MobileCoin bailed on their own AMA and instead put out a coordinated blog post with Signal:

signal.org/blog/update-on…

2/ The blog post essentially says that now they are open to integrating existing currencies once they reach characteristics only available to centralized currencies ATM, but will integrate MobileCoin in the meantime.

Requirements:
3/ It also intentionally mentions Zcash as a future possibility (with speed improvements) without mentioning Monero, who MobileCoin have to thank for their entire privacy protocol.

Full quote:
Read 9 tweets
Seth Simmons Profile picture
12 Apr
Not sure where all of this “Lightning Network will destroy all outside of #Bitcoin” is coming from lately, but important reminder that if LN succeeds, it can be implemented on #Monero:

eprint.iacr.org/2020/1441.pdf

Monero has *proven* itself capable of implementation of improved tech
This is a big “if”, as there are still serious issues with the LN protocol that, to my knowledge, have yet to be fixed:

arxiv.org/pdf/2002.06564…
arxiv.org/pdf/2003.12470…
arxiv.org/pdf/2006.08513…
eprint.iacr.org/2021/384.pdf
But if all of those issues are able to be resolved (among others), Monero can implement LN on top of a private and scalable base-layer, which would make it *better and cheaper* than LN on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has proven it cannot iterate, Monero has proven the opposite.
Read 4 tweets

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