01-24-2024 , 08:49 AM
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity [17 Jan 2024]
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.
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.
Full article:-
www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/