- October 6, 2016
- Posted by: Admin
- Category: Bitcoin News
One of the key advantages of using bitcoin for online gambling transactions is that it’s anonymous. This anonymity helps players to stay safer by avoiding putting things like credit card numbers and electronic wallet log-ins out there with casinos, poker rooms, sports betting sites and other gambling entities. All of that is being threatened now by what could become a pretty big deal in the bitcoin gambling community with a specific analytics toolkit originally developed to locate and identify hackers.
How This Toolkit Works
Here’s how this toolkit works. There are different communication patterns that many people tend to take over and over again, even across multiple online aliases, when conducting transactions on the darknet. This creates a situation where programs can analyze these patterns to pair up bitcoin transactions with specific identity profiles online. The more data that is available, the better of a chance they have to make a batch, but the fact of the matter is that this toolkit is already being used to analyze over 800 different forums, message boards and other online locations every single hour of the day.
There are some limits to what this toolkit can do, however. First, it’s not normally going to lead to an immediate name or address, unless that information has been publicly listed along with the online aliases themselves. Instead, it allows the construction of a payment profile to be tied with an online alias, which can then be used to piece together an analysis of many of the transactions made by that individual. This is the key element of the toolkit and how it can be used that should give online gamblers who use the cryptocurrency some relief.
Is This Likely to Be Used With Online Gambling?
The simple fact of the matter is that this particular toolkit in this particular situation is not likely at all to be used for identifying people who use the cryptocurrency to bet online. This is because people who bet online do not communicate with each other in the ways that are analyzed by this toolkit, and individual transactions aren’t discussed along the same lines as they are for the types of hacker activities that are being discussed on the darknet in this context.
However, it does bring out an important fact that players who use bitcoin should be aware of. While anonynmity is a critical advantage to using bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), the fact of the matter is that there are other aspects of using it that can lead to your identity being tied to your transactions because of the way the blockchain works. In this case, this analytics toolkit is able to match up transactions that are discussed in places that can be accessed by the public with transactions listed on the blockchain to form a profile of who is doing the moving of funds back and forth.
Future Implications
The implications of this toolkit are interesting, and while they don’t concern online gamblers directly, they should be a wake up call to people who don’t think about their security beyond the usage of bitcoin. It’s a pretty big deal to see how information that’s publicly available can be used to put together a profile of an individual using cryptocurrencies, but you have to realize that the information is actually available because the person who made the transactions put it up there. This means you should be careful about who you talk to, online or offline, about your transactions if you don’t want a tool like this to be able to find out what you have been doing with your bitcoin.