Just as the US Department of Homeland Security announced plans to develop forensic techniques to deanonymize cryptocurrency transactions, MasterCard has thrown a spanner in the works with plans for the exact opposite. According to a recent patent application, the payment infrastructure provider wants to anonymize “electronic transactions via blockchain.” The patent explains how the system would obscure the origin and amount of funds involved in a given transaction. MasterCard‘s idea sounds an awful lot like a mixer or tumbler – a system often used by cybercriminals to launder dirty cryptocurrency. Effectively, it works by providing a primary address for a…

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