re: #280 wheat-dogg

In fact, you don’t need to. You can change your receiving address anytime you want.. Since each address is a long alphanumeric string, there are billions of possible addresses, so each user can have as many as he wants. The Silk Road guy was either very cocky or very careless.

Law enforcement can link Bitcoin addresses to IP addresses, too. So, if someone is running a Silk Road-like operation, it’s going to generate a lot of IP traffic, including those traffic on the ports used by Bitcoin apps.

Ultimately though, if someone wanted to buy something illegal over the Internet, they still need to get it from a real physical address. Bitcoins themselves pretty much can’t be used anywhere; you need to change them to actual money to use them in the regular marketplace.

I’m not sure exactly how the FBI figured out who the folks running Silk Road were; I imagine they have more than one method. (There is also nothing to prevent the NSA or FBI from maintaining a blockchain list either.)