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Well, all transaction between Bitcoin addresses are stored forever, and so are fully traceable. What this means in your case is indeed that the credit card company can trace the coins you bought from them.
However, there are a few things to note.
Bitcoin addresses don't have a name assigned. F.e. Bitstamp will not know that the Bitcoins are coming from the ...
10
It is possible to tell that two addresses are in the same wallet if they both appear as an input of a transaction. This indicates that one person owns both of them as they can spend both of them.
It is also quite likely that when you are sending a transaction that has one neat input (say, 1BTC), and one not so neat (say, 0.59721364BTC), that the latter is ...
9
Are there any others that are particularly effective?
Yes, if you know what wallet was used and if its transactions have distinguishing features. For example, multisig wallets usually use p2sh change, but the recipient rarely uses p2sh, which allows to determine the correct change output with high probability.
Data-Driven De-Anonymization in Bitcoin ...
6
There is none, and I don't think it will ever be significant. There is a gentleman's agreement that's part of what makes Bitcoin work that a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin.
You can have a few "rare Bitcoins" with extra value. I might pay extra to have one Bitcoin transferred to me directly from the coins in the genesis block, for example. But just like ...
5
By itself Bitcoin doesn't provide a complete solution however it could be used in conjunction with a trusted non-governmental entity to track charitable flows. The issue is that while Bitcoin provides public and irrefutable evidence of monetary transfers it doesn't (and shouldn't) provide information on who owns those accounts. It would require some ...
5
If an entity runs a large amount of relay nodes on the network, they could figure out which of their nodes was the first to see a transaction, and which peer that transaction came from. That does not necessarily tell them the originating IP, as it could have been a a node relaying a transaction rather than sending one.
This leaves a large amount of ...
4
I think I have an answer. It's not clear if this is how blockchain.info does it, but I'm not sure it matters, either.
Taint is very similar to the everyday experience of diluting a liquid.
Imagine starting with three glasses. One glass contains orange juice. The second contains water. The third is empty.
Pouring some or all of the orange juice into the ...
4
Bitcoins are only ever really anonymous if you mine them your self or were given them by a miner. Once bitcoins are exchanged on, well an exchange (especially one affiliated with the U.S.) then those bitcoins have been associated with you. You can transfer them to other wallet addresses, but it will be visible in the block chain.
You can cycle them through ...
4
The paragraph you copied from the Bitcoin wiki is imprecise.
Transactions result in transaction outputs that usually are associated with specific addresses. I.e. there is a balance of bitcoins associated with an address, that only can be spent by an order signed with the address' corresponding private key. The bitcoins itself are not identifiable, rather ...
4
When a miner in a pool finds a valid block, the pool receives a reward (currently ~50 BTC) in a special generation transaction in the block. The address receiving the generation reward in a given block is known, and pools publish statistics on which blocks they found (and even if not, the miner who found it can in theory know which blocks he himself found if ...
4
That would depend on the owner/operator of the ATM, and your relationship with them. Normally, you will need to register with a Bitcoin ATM company in order to use their machines. This is so that the company can comply with local laws and regulations, just like exchanges need to comply. Effectively, Bitcoin ATMs are not "automatic teller machines", but ...
4
tl;dr You should use rounded values of ZEC when unshielding, and even then you will have less privacy than if you only use z-addrs.
We address this exact question in this blog post (images from which I reproduce below).
Transactions using the Bitcoin-inherited t-addresses are obviously traceable. However, the zero-knowledge property associated with the use ...
4
No, there isn't. Bitcoin has no central management of anything at all.
Public keys are pseudonymous and in general it may not be possible to identify the user to whom a public key belongs. A private key is kept by the user who generated it, and typically is never revealed to anybody else.
4
No, that's completely wrong. There is absolutely no anonymity benefit to third-party transaction malleability.
Third-party transaction malleability makes use of a symmetry in ECDSA signatures that allows changing a transaction's id to exactly one alternative id. The alternative signature has been deprecated and non-standard for years, but miners could still ...
4
I find that claim (tracing the IP address of a transaction) highly suspect as transactions don't have an IP address associated with them. Once a transaction has been broadcast, it is incredibly difficult to figure out what IP address first sent the address. To do so requires that you have a connection to every single node and wallet and determine the IP ...
3
No, it is not possible to determine definitively if two addresses are in the same wallet. The protocol does not have the concept of the wallet. The wallet is a concept within the client.
That is to say, that the client presents the concept of a wallet as a collection of addresses. The only relation between addresses that the protocol knows about is senders ...
3
It depends. Bitcoin is traceable but pseudonymous.
So there would be a path from your first address to your second address. There's no way to prove that the second address is in your wallet at that point. But when you spend from that second address, any party that knows the second address is yours would know that the second address came from funds from ...
3
There is no way to prove in the protocol that two address belong in the same wallet when you send from address A to address B in your wallet. Of course, if you are using some kind of online wallet they do know, but I'm assuming you are using a full one.
However, there can be clues that combined can be quite definitive.
1. Clues when you send the ...
3
The tool for complete history of all bitcoin minted already exist and its called blockchain. You can see all history here (random transaction selected)
https://blockchain.info/tx/ff698f3e5321448d4d889fcd3c91f9e5f5767542d2f0fd7e4aa41a83abec3ab7
There is a term taint and it's meaning how two addresses are connected. It partially explained here What are ...
3
Yes, this is possible. Although most consumer wallets will probably not do that, they're simply meant to scan one QR code, send some coins to that address and return the remainder to a change address you own yourself.
I'm fairly sure the Bitcoin-qt GUI wallet can create transactions to multiple destinations. Command line certainly can do everything.
...
2
I dont like the advertisement of third party services to technical novices!
To answer the question. Bitcoin is perfectly transparent. Privacy relies on the steps you take to protect your identity.
Things you can do to make a tracing harder:
Use a VPN or multiple VPN.
Use Proxy or multiple Proxy.
Use Tor (Multiple Tor instances can lead to ...
2
Bitcoins can be exchanged to dollars in questionable exchanges like BTC-E or LocalBitcoin. These exchanges are not interested in the source of Bitcoin, do not co-operate with authors (police) and thus scammers are able to do cash out stolen Bitcoins. You can only see the Bitcoins go into the exchange, but the exchange won't give you, or the authors, the ...
2
The difficulty with such a scheme would be identifying the customer.
Certainly, the loyalty program operator can monitor incoming transactions to addresses registered by participating merchants. But the public blockchain shows only the address from which the payment was made. The question is how to use that address to identify the customer who should be ...
2
To find all the accounts that hold an asset, e.g. USD/gw1, you just need to use the account_lines API on the gw1 account and filter out the USD entries (or whatever currency code you are interested in).
Although you could recursively look up the account lines of each found account in turn, that doesn't tell you anything more about who "holds the IOUs from a ...
2
First off, I'm glad you didn't send money as that often does not help in these situations. As for tracking the attacker through their bitcoin address, I'm sorry to say but most likely that is not possible. It's impossible to determine the location of a bitcoin address without some sort of identification tied in. They also most likely would tumble the ...
2
I think you're looking for a "mixing" service (I've also heard it called "tumbling"). The idea is you mix your coins with those belonging to others, and send the output to new addresses in new configurations. This makes the "taint" (percentage of coins traceable back to a single address) pretty murky.
Take a look at Mixing Services on bitcoin.it. These ...
2
Even if you use a mixing service it is not guaranteed that the link between the two+ addresses will disappear. Actually, as far as I know it cannot be guaranteed by any mixing service, decentralized or not, including extra fees or not...
In theory, a good mixing scenario would use a purely decentralized service with a consistently huge amount of ...
2
Actually, yes, this is possible. However, your payment output might get split or combined with other payment outputs in later payments. Therefore, the graph will be less linear than you suggest:
C ↴ ↱ H
A → B → D → E → G
↳ F
So, A would be sent to B, then B + C would produce D, D would be split up to E and F, E would further be split ...
2
Nope, don't worry. The nodes you have connected only know that your IP address has downloaded the blockchain, but the transactions you'll make in the future won't contain information specific about it.
The main threat to your privacy are contact points between the blockchain and real life (when you make a purchase and pay with Bitcoin, when you buy at an ...
2
No, an email address cannot be obtained from a Bitcoin address. Addresses can be generated on an offline PC by someone living in a desert who doesn't even have an email address.
Most wallets won't ask you to provide any personal information, they won't even ask you which country you live in, let alone contact information like an email address. Such personal ...
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