Why Blockchain Surveillance Needs FinCEN's Patriot Act Ploy
"FinCEN has proposed to regulate Bitcoin privacy tech under the PATRIOT Act. But the data used to support FinCEN‘s proposal is partial at best, highlighting the gravity of blockchain surveillance software shortcomings," wrote L0La L33tz for Bitcoin Magazine.
- "What we do know is that Chainalysis has “developed thousands of other heuristics based off [of] an understanding of idioms of usage in the bitcoin ecosystem”, according to a research paper."
- "There may be a thousand ways to skin a cat, but if “thousands” of heuristics are necessary to track funds in Bitcoin, we can assume that the processes applied are not necessarily very reliable."
- "This lack of a scientific framework to complete blockchain surveillance tasks is highlighted by the aforementioned paper as well, citing the lack of a “ground-truth dataset for address clusters”."
"FinCEN’s proposal is now supposed to come to blockchain surveillance’s rescue, by enabling the bulk feeding of the so-called intelligence heuristic."
- "We now have three different blockchain surveillance providers all claiming three different things. In the original article, Tel-Aviv based BitOK claims for Hamas to have received over 41 Million USD, while Elliptic claims for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to have received over 93 Million USD in crypto between 2021 and June this year – numbers which, Chainalysis claims, are “overstated”. "
- "Unfortunately for FinCEN, even with total oversight of all alleged mixing transactions, no proposal can change that a science that is not based on fact is fantasy. "
