Quote from: rasspects on April 12, 2012, 04:46 pmsorry not to sound like a noob cuz ive been here for a few months now but how is Dwolla->MtGox traceable? i buy bitcoins from my bank to bitcoin exchange but then i toss em up by sending thru another ewallet service before sending to SR. how is this so traceable? i thought bitcoins were supposed to be anonymous? one other question for lilith...why does buying bitcoins stress u out more then receiving? is selling bitcoins bad too? im a bit confused on why all this is bad after we were told bitcoins are anonymous, great, etc etc? thanks in advance for clarification.Please see the link above to the Bitcoin wiki for an explanation viz the Anonymity of Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity).Personally I think the method you use is safe enough, particularly as SR uses its own built in method for laundering Bitcoins when making purchases. In theory if it is possible to identify someone at the stage of buying BTC, then their transactions can be traced throughout the network as all transactions are public. This is best illustrated by an example.In theory if say a dealer were under investigation for selling drugs and :1. Law Enforcement officials (hereafter abbreviated to LE) were aware they were using Bitcoin to vend their shady wares. 2. The dealer makes their Bitcoin address publicly available or LE had managed to subponea a BTC provider to provide one or more of their Bitcoin addresses.3. You use a traceable method of buying Bitcoins such as transferring money to a provider's bank account from your own and this information is made available to LE....then in theory it would be possible to prove that you had sent Bitcoins to this person. The fact that this has never happened is down to a number of reasons. The first hurdle for LE would be to obtain the Bitcoin addresses used for a particular transaction (although admittedly they would only need one in order to trace the passage of coins through the system). You can minimise the risk of a transaction being traceable to you in this way by spreading any Bitcoins you buy across several wallets.If you need a guarantee of anonymity, you can run your Bitcoins through a mixing service which will swap your coins for someone else's. My personal favourite BitcoinFog does this a number of times to be on the safe side and only charges a commission of 1-3% (even the commission is randomised for your own safety) - of course the coins you're getting may also have originally been obtained through traceable methods but a mixing service breaks the chain of causation between you and them. As I mentioned before, SR has its own mixing service built in to make sure that when vendors withdraw your fees.Naturally you also need to take sensible precautions by encrypting your computer and using PGP to protect your communications but that's been covered at lengths in other posts. Please bear in mind when I say anonymity I am talking about ways to prevent specific Bitcoin transactions being traced to you personally - it would be very easy for someone with access to your telephone company's records to see that you have been using Tor or been visiting the MtGox website but that in itself isn't illegal.V.