The Inner Income Service (IRS) is laying the groundwork for a potential assault on privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency applied sciences.
- IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit challenged its “trade companions” to elucidate the place the crypto tracing group stands on privateness cash, Layer 2 protocols, sidechains and the Schnorr signature algorithm in a June 30 Request for Information (RFI), as first reported by The Block.
- “There are few investigative assets for tracing transactions” that transfer throughout these privacy-enhancing vectors, the IRS mentioned, noting a latest spike in illicit privateness coin use. “The CI Cyber Crimes program is working to get in entrance of this pattern.”
- The IRS singled out the monero, zcash, dash, grin, komodo, verge and horizen privateness cash, sidechains Plasma and OmiseGo, and Layer 2 protocol networks Lightning, Raiden and Celer.
- What’s good for consumer privateness is unhealthy for investigative efficacy: The IRS bemoaned the Bitcoin blockchain’s obvious plans to combine Schnorr signatures, writing that such a transfer will undercut IRS brokers’ present tracing methods.
- The tax company seeks estimates of how a lot it could value to “assist this initiative” in addition to return on funding estimates.
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— to finance.yahoo.com