Amazon has unveiled plans which will allow criminal agencies to make use of big data to link Bitcoin addresses recommended to their owners.
Documents filed considering the US Patent and Trademark Office indicate that Amazon Technologies, a subsidiary within the Seattle tech conglomerate, has won a patent for just a data streaming marketplace not wearing running shoes believes could seriously help law enforcement agencies unmask Bitcoin users.
Simply put, the proposed marketplace enables users a subscription to individual data feeds, which might transmit information in real time. Several data feeds would probably be inconsequential in isolation, but Amazon sees organizations just like law enforcement agencies subscribing to multiple feeds and afterwards using dashboard applications to analyze data and identify correlations.
One potential use case involves law enforcement officials agencies using multiple data streams to review Bitcoin addresses, that happen to be pseudonymous but can be in addition to other data along the lines of shipping addresses to unmask users.
From the patent:
“For example, legislation enforcement agency are sometimes customer and could desire to receive global bitcoin transactions, correlated based on country, with ISP data to figure out source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses. The agency may not want additional available enhancements similar to local bank data records. The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB (gigabyte), one example is, and the agency starting running analytics for the desired data aided by the analysis module.”
That’s one among the data marketplace’s many potential applications, however it is notable that Amazon envisions this as one of the platform’s top use cases.
Indeed, while blockchain-tracing tools exist, law enforcement officials agencies have often struggled to adapt their investigative different ways to Bitcoin and other blockchain-based currency systems.
Identifying individual cryptocurrency users can also be often a difficult process since investigators must determine a piece of identifiable information that may be specifically connected to a cryptocurrency address.
Amazon’s data marketplace would largely automate that process, giving criminal unprecedented guidance for cryptocurrency transactions but perhaps also driving the privacy-conscious toward anonymity-focused cryptocurrencies just like monero and zcash.
