BitLaundry - Reading Assignment

[Emmerich]

1. What information is hidden for Alice? How about Bob?

• I think Alice has all the information: she is the sender, she sends the amount and also, she knows Bob’s address, which she has to supply to BitLaundry so that BitLaundry knows where to forward the funds. As for Bob, he doesn’t necessarily know that it’s Alice - that information (the original sender address) is hidden from him.

2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised.

• BitLaundry has all the information as the middleman and can use that info for its own agenda - selling the linking information between the various parties. Unless BitLaundry is completely automated. But then again, someone could either hack the code or the devs could change the code and syphon off the info before it gets destroyed.
  Or else they could just simply steal the funds.

3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?

• They get a fee for doing the laundry so it’s in their interest not to lose customers due to corruption or malicious actions, or else they lose their business.

4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest?

• Selling the information. Or stealing the funds.

[Alexliljen]

Bitlaundry assignment

1. Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?

• Nothing for Alice, Bob: The sender is hidden.

2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?

• Well the privacy is just for the sender and not the receiver. So the Sender still knows who it sent BTC to. A scenario could be that a third party forces Alice to tell them what address she sent her BTC. The sender has to know to which address it should send the btc to and to whom which means you can link the public adress to a specific person.

3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?

• The fees

4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest?

• Well becuase the bitcoins are sent to an address bitlaundry created i assume they could just send the bitcoin to another address than bobs.

[RobWinehart]

-no one should now she sends to bob btc

• pub key’s of both, bob and alice compromises their privacy
• the business must go on
• peoples money

[javier_ortiz_mir]

1. Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?
   Alice’s hidden information is receiver only. For Bob’s the information hidden is the sender. In neither of both cases the amount is hidden, you can still see the transaction from Alice to bitlaundry and from bitlaundry to bob.
2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?
   If there is no other transactions over a large period of time, it would be clear that alice sent money to bob through bitlaundry, but if many other transactions are taken place, then it would not be so clear as to whom is sending money to whom
3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?
   I guess its the fee that is charged to the sender (0.5%+0.01% per receiver)
4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest?
   I guess it could be the fact that if several BTC are sent trough bitlaundry, bitlaundry could have some incentives to divert some of the funds to an address that belongs to one of its creators

[mr_nv]

1. They don’t know each other’s public or private address
   2.if the wallet info (passwords etc) is revealed to someone
   3.They collect a fee for the transaction. If they aren’t honest they would be forced to restructure or go out of business.
2. If they decide to take the money and run there’s no contractual agreement between them and the wallet holder.

[looperdave]

By using its own address as the receiver or middleman, it is able to obfuscate who the eventual recipient of the funds are. Vice versa goes for Bob, he is protected from someone knowing the original sender of the funds because he only receives the money from the bitlaundry address.
without this service, a forensic block explorer could use kyc, ip addresses and interconnected transactions to trace whom the senders and receivers are and all previous transactions.
Bitlaundry makes money by successful obfuscating and passing along transactions. If they do the job well and in a trustworthy manner, they continue to earns high fees. On the contrary, becuase Bitlaundry first receives the funds through an address they own, it is possible they could be hacked or lose the private keys, or even hijack the funds and use their own service to obfuscte the funds down the line to steal them. Some sort of inside job or a hack or even a traceable pattern of how the software which mixes the funds is about the only way they could be compromised

[Olivier]

1. For Alice the receiver information is hidden. You can see that she sent an amount to a large pool of BTC, but you can’t know to whom they where finally sent. And for Bob, you will be able to see that he received money from the pool but not who directly sent it to him. a lot of people will send money at the same time and a lot of people will receive money at the same time which would make it impossible (or really hard) to link the pair Sender/receiver together.

2. If Alice was the only sender on Bitlaundry and Bob the Only receiver on a 30 minutes block, it would be easy to link the pair together. Or if Bitlaundry data is stolen/ceased.

3. Building a reputation of trust and attracting a lot of transaction and cashing on fees.

4. They could redirect large transaction to themselves and disappear.

[Obi]

1.)

• Alice doesn’t know the receiver.
• Bob doesn’t know the sender.

2.)

• If Bitlaundry is getting hacked
• If the government takes the data by force and can establish a connection between Alice and Bob.
• If Bitlaundry shares their information

3.)

• To establish an honest business model in the long term.
• This is a pay service, it’s priced at roughly 0.5% of the transaction

4.)

• Fast cash grab (scam)

[Emmett]

1. The address that Bob receives the amount from is not known by Alice. The address that Alice sent the bitcoin to is not known by Bob
2. Bitlaundry seems in essence like a centralized system that is interfacing with a decentralizing system. Bitlaundry is in control of all the users public addresses so they are a single point of failure for trust.
3. They rely on transaction fee percentages and their reputation
4. If they got one large enough BTC transaction, they could keep the BTC for themselves, power down all their systems and then run for the hills with their ill-gotten gains

[JRSmith88]

1. the public keys, and the direct transaction between A and B is private on the network to anybody observing it.

2. if private keys on BitLaundry are revealed, the transactions can be tracked.

3. it charges a fee as an incentive to help get a good reputation.

4. greed. they can potentially disable user withdrawals if they wanted and exit scam.

[enrico]

1. Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?
   alice uses a single use address so bob doesn’t see her real address
   alice knows bob address because she need to send the money to him
   alice and bob addresses are not linked because the transactions are paid out from bitlaundry

2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?
   the system is as safe as the size of the user, few users more possibility to link alice and bob, more users less possibility

3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest? to be a business which get profit from fees of a big network

4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest? to steal the money

a decentralized service like this would overcome the issue

[Lucus]

BitLaundry

• Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?
  • Alice = receiver, Bob = sender. Depositing BTC into a large pool and it being sent to the senders allocated address without the receiver knowing who the sender was, and vice versa.
• Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?
  • If the address registry doesn’t get deleted completely/get leaked or sold.
• What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?
  • The fee rewards + more customers using their product, which increases fees.
• What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest?
  • Selling information + stealing funds from the pool.

[philibiza]

1. Alice knows it all while Bob doesn’t know Alice’s address and her BTC amount.

2. If there is only one transaction at this time it would be easy to find out and track sender and receiver.

3. To get more users and earn more fees for every transaction.

4. BitLaundry could steal the funds. A lot of trust required.

[Raquel]

1.- All info from Alice and Bob is unlink using middle sender and receiver who break the total amount in many TXs and pairs of keys.

2.- If bitlaundry is hacked, is possible to link amounts and senders and receivers.

• If they don’t use VPN ip could be detected when Alice move the money to Bitlaundry
• Because Bitlaundry is not set in the deep web could be detected closed, when we became completely digital
• If the law of Alice and Bob is more economic dictatorial, they will have no scape unless they move money that came into the ecosystem by a DEX

3.- the money coming from the fees; because they are idealist people that want to keep BTC improving

4.- The price of the owners; pressure from governments to put then in jail

[leemac]

1. For Alice, the receiver is hidden. For Bob, the sender is hidden

2. BitLaundry has a database link between Alice’s one-time-use address and Bob’s address which is deleted after sending the bitcoin to Bob - if this database is hacked then privacy could be compromised

3. BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest is that it makes commission on each transaction

4. BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest is that it could just steal the bitcoins sent to it

[confusius]

They do not want anyone to see, who receives the coins.

It cannot be hidden by bitlaundry.

The service is supposed to be trusted.

There is no registration or contract.

[CC123]

1. Bob’s and Alice’s addresses are hidden from the transaction.
2. If the amount being sent is unique and the fees structure known, I could then match what was sent from Alice’s ID to what was received by Bob, less fees.
3. Reputation damage.
4. Heaps and Heaps of BTC.

[carolb]

1. Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?
   A) Bitcoin address’ aren’t linked as there is no direct transfer of funds.

2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?
   A) BitLaundy could be exposed to a database hack.

3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?
   A) Customer service, trust, without it there is no BitLaundry.

4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest?
   A) Rug pull. if there were to be a huge transaction… they could fold the company and keep the funds.

[BERGLUND]

1 Alice must know her private key, the amount, Bob’s public key and a public key of BitLaundry. Bob may get a separate message from Alice: “I sent you 100 BTC.”, but he cannot find who sent the 100 BTC from the blockexplorer. It seems to work like a deck of cards, when playing poker, but with everyone signing the cards before discarding them. All info is still on the BC, but it is harder to trace.
2If BitLaundry’s escrow service is nonliquid, too few inputs renders poor rearrangements of the transferred BTCs.
3 Keeping the service honest, may generate income to BitLaundry for a long time.
4 BitLaundry may at some time make sort of a rug pull, when the contract is very liquid. Due to the random delay, the randomness can be extended to infinity.

However as time passes, there will be increased possibilities to track every sat back to the origin, if desired.

[Lacho]

1. Alice uses BitLaundry to send funds to Bob. What information is hidden for Alice: sender, receiver or amount? How about for Bob?
   Alice doesn’t know Bob’s real public address. Bob doesnpt know Alice’s private address.

2. Explain a situation where Alice’s and Bob’s privacy could be compromised?
   The Bitcoin sent between Alice and Bob, can not be hidden by Bitlaundry.

3. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be honest?
   If they are not honest, it will know inmediately.

4. What is BitLaundry’s incentive to be dishonest
   If the big transaction is send to Bitlaundry in behalf of a clint they could decide to keep it to themselves.