Most crypto coins (not Monero) are pseudonymous. If a particular bitcoin wallet comes to somebody's attention they can investigate hassle anybody that this person tries to trade with, tell exchanges not to redeem cash, etc.

Thing is these tactics aren't just available to the authorities but also to anyone like intelligence agencies, the mafia, etc. so the confidentiality problems are much much worse with crypto.

▲

paulgerhardt 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Most crypto coins (not Monero) are pseudonymous.

It's worth reading the OSPEAD report from the Monero Community: https://www.getmonero.org/2025/04/05/ospead-optimal-ring-sig...

> Monero users with extreme threat models should be aware that anti-privacy adversaries can leverage timing information to increase the probability of guessing the real spend in a ring signature to approximately 1-in-4.2 instead of 1-in-16.

So slightly worse odds than Russian Roulette. Cool. Cool.

	▲	akimbostrawman 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not Russian roulette. It's a guess you still don't know if you are right. There is still plausible deniability. Hopefully FMCP will get implement soon to mitigate these issues.

▲

whatsupdog 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> tell exchanges not to redeem cash

Try telling it to Chinese, Russian, Indian exchanges.

	▲	PaulHoule 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also... I dunno about India (I think of it as a dysfunctional democracy) but China and Russia are notorious authoritarian economies that people want to take money out of and that's a big part of the global money laundering problem. You might have a problem that your money is in Bitcoin but turn it into Rubles or Yuan and now you have another problem.
	▲	PaulHoule 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What if it is the Chinese or Russian or Indian governments you're worried about? None of those have a libertarian attitude, even if they think it's cool to thumb their nose at Uncle Sam from time to time.