400 Bitcoin addresses are on the sanction list

Just a few years after the US Treasury announced the first sanctions against two bitcoin addresses, the list has now grown to 398 addresses, according to OpenSanctions, a project that uses more than 50 sources to track sanctioned assets.

For example, they list the address 3Lpoy53K625zVeE47ZasiG5jGkAxJ27kh1, which they claim belongs to the EUROPE WARRANTYan entity associated with Estonia and Russia, and is on the OFAC list of Specially Designated Nationals.

This is just one address we randomly picked out of hundreds, it remains unclear how they give names to bitcoin addresses that are pseudo-anonymous.

We have not verified the accuracy of this data, but their code is open on GitHub, so anyone can check it out.

The only source of encryption listed is ransomwhe.re, a website that collects addresses known to be associated with ransomware payments.

They track as many as 7,508 ransomware addresses, making this potentially data mining, especially for enforcement but also for exchanges.

However, they don’t list sources like ChainAnalysis. Sanctioned bitcoin addresses can therefore come directly from the Treasury, which does the identity assignment, with OpenSanctions possibly acting more as an aggregator.

Bitcoin’s public nature, though pseudo-anonymous, is clearly leading to more sophisticated money-tracking systems.

Making crypto-crime in the future may be very difficult as your address cannot be frozen by the network but by everything else if spotted by these systems.

However, Bitcoin can still be moved and a sanctioned Russian entity could still transfer the coins to an unsuspecting third party in Russia, China or India, for example.

For example, the address mentioned above moved your bitcoins, although not much, only $183 with this transfer in 2019.

But interestingly enough, they sent him to a… address who received 343 bitcoinsalthough your closing balance is now zero.

Leaving here is riskier in terms of establishing guilt. If that 3EV address was part of sanctions and OpenSanctions said no, it would have been easy because any transfer suspicious can be verified as innocent or not, but now you need to fix this.

As you might expect, nothing shows up at this 3EV address, so we have no idea who it is. Exchanges or companies specializing in blockchain analysis can do it, but often they can’t.

Most transfers from this address are also for very small amounts, but with one of the transfers and only two hops, we ended up at a pretty big address.

And best of all, this address, 13x, also has a closing balance of nothing. Moving on from here can get a bit more interesting with some small addresses under 1,000 BTC with some bitcoin, like 200, as their ending balance.

But at this point, we’re so far from where we started that you’ll need corroborating evidence that one of the latter addresses has something to do with the sanctioned address.

All this illustrates that you can sanction the address, but can you sanction bitcoin? Is it also counterproductive to publish these sanctioned addresses instead of a private listing for exchanges?

Because you can’t enforce anything at the network level and thus move from the old to the new system without changes, on the surface it may seem to work, but it actually lacks a lot of nuance.

Instead, a new system may be needed to account for the very fast moving nature of bitcoin in regards to that particular sanctioned address, for example the sanction doesn’t seem to have worked because it’s easy to lose track of coins after a few minutes. movements.