On: How Do Criminals Launder Money Through a Restaurant?

[Pitarou]

Bitcoins can be made almost as anonymous as cash. Bitcoin wallets (accounts) are anonymous, and bitcoin launderers claim they can obfuscate transactions by mixing them with other transactions and sending them through complicated webs of temporary bitcoin wallets.

But bitcoin launderers aren't really money launderers. They conceal the source of your funds, but they don't create a plausible fake source. You still need to launder your money.

[Retr0spectrum → Pitarou]

Surely bitcoin gives you plausible deniability? Anyone with a dubious source of BTC could say they mined them "back in the day".

[Pitarou → Retr0spectrum]

That's a good idea, but it wouldn't stand up to blockchain scrutiny. Most of those dubiously sourced bitcoins were mined much more recently.

You could invent more lies to explain all the turnover and transfers, but it would look suspicious as hell. Deniable, but not very plausible.