Everyone can. You could track them yourself, if you took an interest.
The only anonymous part of it is that the blockchain only contains a record of wallet numbers, not names. But that’s an easy veil to pierce for anyone with subpoena powers: Look for wallets that are known to belong to legitimate big businesses, and then ask them about the transactions they took part in: What were they selling, what do they know about who they sold it to, did they deliver to an address, etc.
Not unless you have:
The first one is not a sign of Trump’s intelligence, but of him being born into money.
But it takes a lot of intelligence to get a big megaphone and large audience.
Also, Trump had to hire people he could trust not to rip him off on setting up his crypto empire.
I know a million dollars isn’t what it used to be, but I’ll bet lots of the gambler/investors he takes for a ride on crypto are multimillionaires who paid for investment advice. They just were not as good at paying the right person as Trump (or could it be Trump Jr?).
The usual response to this is say how Trump lost money on casinos, but Atlantic City was tanking generally at the time. Also, he seems to learn from financial mistakes.
I wasn’t speaking of intelligence … FWIW.
I’m sure plenty of representatives are looking into getting in on the action.
~Max
Take it up with Jihi. They’re the one saying Trump is inventing new crimes.
Me, I’m saying Trump isn’t inventing anything. He’s just doing basic low level crimes and not doing them very well. He’s leaving evidence all over the place and the only reason he’s not in prison is the Republicans are refusing to act.
Yup. I regularly watch (and support via Patreon) the internet investigator/YouTuber “Cofeezilla”. He investigates fraud, mostly (but not exclusively) involving crypto. Once you are able to figure out that a wallet is attached to a particular person, it unlocks a huge web of transactions that are publicly available. Like, X transferred to Y a certain amount, and then it went to Z, and so on. He’s able to clearly show how money gets moved around, when, how much, and all of that once he gets just that one connection. It gets shown in many of his videos.
I ask people, imagine everything in your bank account is public information except your name. And if someone were to figure out somehow what your bank account number was, they could then see a ton of your financial information. That’s sort of what it’s like with crypto. (Not exactly; there are nuances with bank accounts that aren’t present with crypto wallets, but it gives you the same general idea.)
Why don’t they track down the ConArtist in Chief’s account? I expect it would be easy to find by the large numbers of orders at McDs.
My total WAG is that the only transactions you’d find are people putting money in, and then Trump cashing out.
I don’t believe McDonald’s accepts crypto payments, but it’s been a few months since I’ve ordered anything from there, so who knows.
I’m not going to get into specifics, but there are ways to exchange different currencies for each other that has no additions to the ledger on either end of those transactions. The trail ends at one end of that exchange and a new trail that’s unconnected starts at the other end of that exchange. Now, could you use context clues to put these things together? Probably, but that’s the sort of tracing that a forensic audit comes up with, not just entering a wallet address into polyscan or whatever.
So yes, everything a wallet has done is publically accessible. Whether or not you can tie the wallet identity to a person is not always clear. And there are some tricks beyond that to make it harder to follow the chain. And given that Trump is basically the leader of a criminal organization, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had someone competent in the money laundering department, given that’s really his only successful business pre-presidency. Maybe Big Balls is doing it. Maybe it’s Barron. After all, he was able to turn on a laptop and that mystified Trump and prompted him to call him a tech genius.
It’s not that everything about crypto is traceable, but it’s certainly more traceable than any other monetary system in wide use today.
When people say “untraceable”, I think they really mean “unregulated”, which is true to a large extent, and is why it is so favored among those with a criminal mindset. You can certainly get away with schemes in crypto that would get you prosecuted if you used traditional money and/or markets, because it’s too new to have laws on the books for it yet, and (at least in the US) legislators seem to have no urgency to implement regulation.
It’s no wonder that someone like Trump finds it so appealing.
It should also be mentioned that not all crypto transactions are crypto transactions. That is to say, any cryptocurrency has mechanisms built into it to make transactions. Those mechanisms are basically 100% secure, or as close to it as anything used by humans can be, and they’re also 100% traceable (at least as regard what’s in what wallet). But they’re also slow and can be expensive.
When most people deal in crypto, they’re not actually using those built-in mechanisms, just like most people who buy or sell gold aren’t actually handling lumps of metal. Rather, you have some sort of crypto exchange, which functions sort of like a bank. The exchange does hold the key for a wallet or group of wallets that contain a bunch of cryptocurrency, but then they have some sort of ledger that they maintain on their own that says that such-and-such number of bitcoins belongs to user so-and-so. Transactions of this sort can be just as quick and easy as any other financial transaction.
The risk, of course, is that it’s the exchange, not you, that has actual control of the cryptocurrency itself. This is not different in principle than your bank having control of your money, except that, over the centuries, we’ve built up a bunch of regulations preventing banks from just taking your money and running, and many banks are themselves centuries old, and have built up a lot of trust. Crypto has neither those regulations nor that history, and so there have been several big cases of exchanges collapsing when their owners sucked them dry (and their customers, of course, being screwed over).
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump himself doesn’t have the keys to the wallets that his crypto are stored in, and that control of the wallets is actually completely in the hands of whatever flunky he has running that operation. Which means, in turn, that I also wouldn’t be surprised if whoever that flunky is someday decides he’s just going to rob Trump blind.