It is hard to know what is what. The size of transactions is not a good indicator of criminal activity. Every day, entities move what looks like an astounding amount of money but it's just a drop in the bucket compared to what financial institutions move around. The big transactions are casinos, hosted wallets and exchanges and they are often moved automatically to ensure security. Basically, in a public/private key system, you have to move your earned bitcoins from a wallet where the key is hosted on the server, to a wallet where the key has never touched the network (it's called a paper or offline wallet). So basically, the money is not necessarily moving from one entity to another but being stuffed under many mattresses owned by the same people :)

It's a wonderful place of plausible deniability! (sung in the key of the Yellow Brick Road song from The Wizard of Oz)

Currency arbitrage is when people tumble currencies between BTC - Xaltcoin - LTC - ETH - USD and between different venues that may have slight price differences. It's like doing Forex by running between different currency counters LOL It's a huge pain in the ass but with bots it could be done more easily.

Haha it is. And Comey was on the board or CEO and surely knew and enabled the Cartel money laundering

Sure.. but I still think the Federal Reserve's pedodollar is a bigger enemy than bitcoin, at the moment.

Remember that most of the dark web is stolen credit card details, illegal drugs and hard to get self-defence items. It's not healthy seeing paedophiles everywhere. Even most low-level (or even high level) criminals would be disgusted by paedophilia.

Ask yourself why they still use the modern art scene for money laundering, if they're just using crypto-currency now. Like the earlier poster said, they use more traditional methods which are probably safer for them.

I will spell it out for you. James Comey.

Currently, the biggest drivers of acquisition for Bitcoin and Ethereum are initial stock offerings (ICO) and speculation.

The entities that transfer a lot of money around are speculators, exchanges (which do about 60-70k btc equivalent in transactions each day and there are hundreds of them) and... online casinos.

While bitcoin is useful to transfer a lot of money for pennies, the usability of the currency depends on how easy it is to change for cash in your country. I can send money to some guy in Zimbabwe for whatever but what is he going to do? Perhaps nurture an online gambling habit?!

Stealing bitcoins has been the best venture in the world so this is the main vector of illegal activities in cryptocurrency and criminals would be the most obvious and easy marks for theft. My dream job :)

Bitcoin is not at all anonymous and I would not suggest criminals (the gray market kind) use it unless they are super well organized and have a cryptocurrency expert on staff.Else they just fill the blockchain with interesting evidence.

If you want to follow the state of the art use of crypto for illicit purchases (usually grey and black market goods) look at the popularity of Monero (XMR) or Dash (DASH), both being popular on Silk Road type sites. As you can see it's kind of lukewarm still.

The people who traffick in humans are very well banked and use traditional organizations... H cough S cough B cough C cough cough cough...

"f you know the persons bitcoin address with a name connected to it you can find out the other transactions"

About Bitcoin and Comet Ping Pong

https://youtu.be/IHdWp4Ro2Qo?t=14m7s

Thanks for posting this. I had never seen this link!

I don't really understand Bitcoin, but I do understand that they can hide nasty purchases of children or CP, as much as buying a car, or a cup of coffee. Really, I guess it has come to that. That buying a child has become blase to them, like buying a cup of coffee. As much as they think they are hiding, we can see right through them. Peekaboo We See You.

Biggest transaction passing by 1500 BTC - 3 865 291.95 usd !