<
https://arstechnica.com/features/2024/01/how-a-27-year-old-busted-the-myth-of-bitcoins-anonymity/>
"JUST OVER A DECADE AGO, Bitcoin appeared to many of its adherents to be the
crypto-anarchist holy grail: truly private digital cash for the Internet.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the cryptocurrency’s mysterious and unidentifiable inventor,
had stated in an email introducing Bitcoin that “participants can be
anonymous.” And the Silk Road dark-web drug market seemed like living proof of
that potential, enabling the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal
drugs and other contraband for bitcoin while flaunting its impunity from law
enforcement.
This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the
opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers,
tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more
transparency than the existing financial system. That discovery would upend the
world of cybercrime. Bitcoin tracing would, over the next few years, solve the
mystery of the theft of a half-billion dollar stash of bitcoins from the
world’s first crypto exchange, help enable the biggest dark-web drug market
takedown in history, lead to the arrest of hundreds of pedophiles around the
world in the bust of the dark web’s largest child sexual abuse video site, and
result in the first-, second-, and third-biggest law enforcement monetary
seizures in the history of the US Justice Department.
That 180-degree flip in the world’s understanding of cryptocurrency’s privacy
properties, and the epic game of cat-and-mouse that followed, is the larger
saga that unfolds in the book
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the
Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, out this week in paperback.
All of it began when a young, puzzle-loving mathematician named Sarah
Meiklejohn started to pull out traceable patterns in the apparent noise of
Bitcoin’s blockchain.. This excerpt from
Tracers in the Dark reveals how
Meiklejohn came to the discoveries that would launch that new era of crypto
criminal justice."
Via Christoph S, who wrote "Fascinating read. Kudos to that researcher!"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
