Bitcoin's $137k Jackpot
Can someone else confirm to me that I&#x27;m not crazy and the central distinction of this article is totally bogus?<p>Reasoning: BitCoin isn&#x27;t, to my knowledge, a scheme where some private identifier is stored inside each &quot;coin&quot; whose ownership is revealed with a zero-knowledge proof; it&#x27;s simply one where you have public and private keys and use those private keys to sign transactions saying &quot;Take X1 out of my public key K1 and put X2 in public key K2, with X1 - X2 going to the miner.&quot; That is, BitCoins themselves, as I understand them, are just points in a big distributed videogame: they do not represent actual packets of data which are individually &#x27;minted&#x27; in mining and stored on your computer until you spend them.<p>If that&#x27;s correct, then there&#x27;s no distinction if you tumble-via-miners versus tumble-via-tumblers -- either way the coins are &#x27;freshly minted&#x27;; there&#x27;s simply no other sort of coin.<p>The only real thing that you seem to be able to do here is to tumble via <i>both</i> the tumblers and the miners, which might create some binary tree of complexity if someone tries to &quot;follow the money&quot; -- but that doesn&#x27;t seem to be what the author is saying.<p>Is there legitimately something in each coin which makes it easier to follow a given bitcoin via tumbling than through miner-money-laundering, or are they really just the same thing performed through different channels, with a much slower rate of success for the MML tumbling?