"In the early
2010s
people assumed
bitcoin
would be used for
money laundering
, which is reasonable given that bitcoin used to be this obscure entity dwelling in the dark corner. It's not farfetched to believe such a thing would be used by
criminals
to hide money. But today with increasing mainstream adoption, this fear has been proven misconstrued. Now it is obvious that hiding money is actually much more difficult with a persistent, openly available
ledger
. Who would've thought?"
The lecture hall resonated a soft, genuine laughter. The professor sipped his
coffee
and cleared his throat.
"Many looking to launder their money have found it quite frustrating to figure out ways to take their money out from bitcoin. Any significant attempts would trigger a
whale alert
. And small attempts were too laborious and could be tracked anyway. The frustrated parties learned that when all of the currency was tied to a single wallet address, any transactions in the future could be easily tracked by watching that address. No matter how many other wallets they tried to shuffle their money through could be tracked in perpetuity. Making it impossible to get away clean with any significant money laundering. There would always be a tie from the blockchain to a
fiat
off-ramp."
Hector listened to the lecture while stroking the strings of his hoodie. His hands were sweaty. When he had asked for the 500
ETH
he had thought its price would keep going up. It had been just around $4000 at the time. And now it was... much lower.
He could still retire off of that amount. Although had he known where the market was heading then he would've asked for more. He had yet to tap into any of his ETH yet. He was still using the cash that he had withdrawn from his traditional fiat savings. But soon he would need to tap into the ETH. He didn't want to until he absolutely needed to. And also not until he could find a way to pull it out without it being attached to the wallet addresses in question.
Upon receiving the ransom he had shuffled the ETH to eight different addresses, all owned by him. He had transcribed the the seed phrases into physical notebooks. No digital representation of them existed. And he had not written the seed phrase out in their literal forms. Instead he had a file within his laptop named something inconspicuous. Within it was a dictionary, mapping out routines for plant care to a word. For example watering the aloe mapped out to "dogs"; trimming the bonzai in the blue container mapped out to "shuttle".
When he left his apartment he had packed six of his notebooks. He didn't want to have all of them on his body in case something happened. The two he had left in his apartment were his treasure chest. Nobody would think different about his personal notebooks containing his plant care routine. Even if he were to get locked in prison they would allow him his personal notebooks in the future. Then he would at least have something of value attached to him. No matter what happened legally.
But things did not go as planned once he was out of the country. Nothing he could point to literally in 'real life'. It was all in his head. His mind was fucked. There was no way he could return to that old apartment for those two notebooks. He had made this decision less than a week after being out of the states. But now he thought 'what if'. Just return and get them back.
Did you write the lecture bits ? they sound utterly unscientific but that could be exactly the kind of thing they teach in a university lecture about bitcoin.
