06
Dec 2019
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Crypto Dust Spam is that targeting cryptocurrency users which in term receive
miniscule amounts of BTC from service along with a promotional message…
Use mixers or tumblers is a way to keep your privacy and to make forensics analysis difficult for others. Of course that most mixers aren't using any kind of KYC(Know Your Customer) checks. We now can ask ourself which kind customers do mixers have with theeese policies, from this we can conclude of small group of hardcore lovers blockchain, which are innocent but have reason why need to be anonymous, sililar can be the canse with politicans. users are doing money laundry, terrorist funding or hide profit from criminal activities...
This is the reason why all mixers are marked as high risk by all blockchain forensics tools, in turn many of exchanges and other companies in blockchain ecosystem will not accept this kind of funds. Unfortunately we need to mark as tainted crypto all funds that come from mixers and that small percent of people will be marked as mixers even though their crypto was clean before.
Crypto dust or Spam
Crypto Dust is similar in concept to air drops used in ETH idea is to send to users of crypto you want (Bitcoin,Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash) small amounts of coins and to attach your promotional message to it. This is very effective as you can target audience that uses crypto and only them and is much cheaper than Google Adwords which can cost up to 1USD per click. So in its essence, it's an effective way to reach and build the community.
But here there is a big ramification as crypto dusting is not harmless. Here as we do with money this means that tainted money could be sent to clean addresses and this will make the process of detecting good players and bad one many times more difficult for example, BestMixer is technically tainting all addresses that they send money to as they are receiving tainted money without their consent. In future years this will become a primary kind of spam and all algorithms must be made in a way to compensate for this potential big dusting campaigns. This must be made in a way that clean users stay clean even after receiving a spam advertising.
Crypto dusting is good term as like dust they are spreading their money with certain classification across entire surface of blockchain ecosystem. In this way a new form of spam was born
The first spam sent from Bitmixer is given in post below on BitcoinTalk.
“Dear Friends,
This is just the beginning.
Glad you enjoyed it.
Yours sincerely, BestMixer Team”
After sending this BestMixer bragged of their new advertising strategy with the next statement: “A new advertising technology invented by our mixer. In short, every day we send to bitcoin wallets of all active users a noticeable amount of 0.00000888 BTC, which is accompanied by a comment about BestMixer service.”
However, to get access to their message, you would have to be looking at raw blockchain data, which no consumer is doing. So, this is either a message to large-scale money launderers or a taunt.
Dust Attack
Dusting attack is performed by "dusting" many addresses with tainted money in an attempt to foil blockchain analytics tools. In this way all will get classification of tainted and than any exchange will reject all of the addresses, this will lower every user reputation and make it similar to a DoS attack.
Whatever was the original motivation "Dusting" similar to "Air Drops" is here to stay and we must adapt to it.
Stay tuned!
Aleksandar JELIC