Meh. That's old news. Literally, it's 3 years old.

Also, tumbling is an important part of the equation, and the article doesn't address it at all since it wasn't available back then.

The fact remains: BTC from illegal activity + tumbling + BTC wallet set up to maximize anonymity = untraceable, currently.

I think we both agree that tumbling is the secret sauce here for the hackers.

As far as ATM's go, I'd say that they present more of a security risk to the hackers than a lot of other types of transactions in that they are likely to be recorded on video. So, the hackers would need to use a disguise or a bag man to avoid identification.

If a hacker was paid in conventional currency and went to an regular ATM, there would be no way for authorities to know when and where the transaction took place among thousands (or millions) of ATM transactions. With a bitcoin ATM, authorities can tell exactly when and where the transaction occurred -- that's a huge lead in tracking down the culprits. (Again, tumbling notwithstanding.)

Cheers.

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"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

That's fair, if bad guys deposited money at ATM's the source is undetectable. Very true.

But Bitcoin ATM's aren't very secure. They might be able to get video from surrounding businesses etc. to track down the bad guys, but how long do they record? There's a lot of variables. If they do it right, its anonymous. Most people don't though. Same with money laundering. There's no new tricks to laundering money, police know about all of them.

But here's a new wrinkle, just for fun. Quantum computing (when it arrives and is mainstream) may be able to reverse bitcoin tumbling. Fun stuff!

Wtf is tumbling?

Bitcoin have a public ledger. If you know your friends Bitcoin wallet id, you can see what he has bought etc.

Bad guys don't really want their purchases tracked. So a "tumbler" is a service where you send them your bitcoins and they will send you back different ones without the transaction going through the public ledger. In real world terms, if you had a bill that was marked and being tracked by the Police, it's the equivalent of trading bills with someone else randomly. Usually several times. It's hard to figure out who had what bill originally.

They charge for the service, but if you're trying to launder money it's going to cost money.

Yes, good point! Think I meant more that the hacks weren't generally particularly sophisticated. People are definitely the weakest link in the chain though...