Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: lightonion on June 27, 2011, 07:14 pm
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How much money can I take from my bank account and put into Dwolla before someone starts to notice that I'm putting a lot of money into it?
I'm thinking of putting like $300+ into bitcoins through that, and plan on doing a fair amount of business through BTC in the future, so should I find a better way than Dwolla for these transactions or will these transactions go unnoticed for the most part?
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Transfers from one financial institute to another is not a big deal.
The route from Dwolla to your BTC exchanger is a bigger deal.
Even these though should not be a big deal.
It's your money do what you want with it.
I don't see any normal flags being raised from these transactions.
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I've done the same thing. When I started I was a little too excited to get going to be completely anonymous. Here is my trail: My BofA account ~Dwolla~Tradehill~MyBitcoin~SR. And on top of that I did not use PGP for either of my address transmissions. But from what I understand I should be perfectly safe regardless, even though I didn't take every last precaution. What do y'all think? How many people have a trail from cash to bitcoins? Of course once converted, BTC are presumably mixed so much as to be anonymous, even though the initial purchase is 'public'. Should I let this keep me up at night?
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For additional security in case all SR bitcoin receive addresses are compromised (admittedly unlikely), I send all bitcoins from exchanges to a single-use bitcoin address on my PC. I'm using the standard bitcoin client, which connects via Tor using SOCKS proxy (settings-->options-->connect through proxy). I think this gives me plausible deniability that it might not have been me that sent bitcoins to the SR address, and since it's through Tor, it should be a fairly good alibi. I haven't done any testing to verify that the bitcoin client doesn't leak any data.
After receiving coins & sending them to their final destination, I then securely erase the bitcoin wallet.dat file. The next time bitcoin is started, it makes a new wallet, and I rinse and repeat as desired. The bitcoin client gives very little control over how bitcoin transactions are created, so I think it's best just to use wallet files once before deleting.
I've also been bouncing coins through the bitcoin laundry ( http://bitcoinlaundry.com ), which breaks the block chain connection between incoming coins and outgoing coins for a fee of 0.5%
http://bitcoinlaundry.com/
A better app, http://app.bitlaundry.com/, does a similar block-chain breaking, but in addition, it does time shifting to avoid correlation attacks, allowing you to schedule the number of transactions and amount of time between incoming coins and outgoing coins. It's down right now, hopefully will come up soon, also 0.5%.
Given what I've seen so far from SR -- still up even after quite a bit of heat! -- I'd be shocked if Silk Road wasn't already doing something similar with both incoming and outgoing bitcoins. Most likely, all of my efforts are just serving to occupy my time and amuse me, but I still think 0.5% is worth the peace of mind.