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.”

    • my_hat_stinks@programming.devEnglish
      1014·
      6 months ago

      You’re not wrong, but the first words are literally “Just over a decade ago”. It’s not a news article, it’s the story of the research in 2013 which revealed bitcoin isn’t anonymous.

      • 520@kbin.social
        497·
        6 months ago

        It wasn’t a revelation in 2013 either. The ledger data has always been public information.

        • massive_bereavement@kbin.social
          242·
          6 months ago

          But neither the addresses nor the people who had them where. It would be like saying that you can identify someone from an arp table because you can see the mac addresses.

          Unless you know specifically who own said address (even to the point that those can be spoofed) you just have a big pile of wet paper.

          • 520@kbin.social
            186·
            6 months ago

            Plenty of ways to identify people from their spending habits.

            There are also plenty of ways to connect the address to the person. You can subpoena a legit vendor they’ve paid with that address, for example.

    • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      182·
      6 months ago

      An article in Wired doesn’t speak to the “crypto space”, they speak to your aunt and uncle in Missouri who don’t know about this.

        • Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          6 months ago

          St. Louis has a decent tech scene, AT&T used to have their headquarters there. There’s still a large tech presence there, low cost of living drives tech companies to hire there since they can pay lower wages and no one in the area really cares since you can still get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 a month.

        • dasgoat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          I mean I’m an absolute troglodyte when it comes to technology and I’m here too. Hi!

      • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        true, but paying in cash is sort of difficult over the internet.

        You can send it via mail, but mail is slow and it could potentially be traced back to you.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      81·
      6 months ago

      How does Monero work compared to the other big ones?

      • bjorney@lemmy.caEnglish
        242·
        6 months ago

        Every time there is a transaction the sender’s funds are mixed together with a bunch of other senders, and the recipients receive their money from this random pool, so there is no direct association between sender/receiver

          • fluxion@lemmy.worldEnglish
            74·
            6 months ago

            Yes I laundered some of my salary from work. don’t report me please.

            • stown@sedd.itEnglish
              613·
              6 months ago

              Well people like you aren’t the issue so much as you are the enablers.

        • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
          10·
          6 months ago

          This is not quite correct. You do not have to involve anybody else in your transaction. What happens is the protocol takes a random selection of 15 other people who have spent money and adds them to a ring so that your transaction could be any one of 16 different outputs. But there is no mixing of funds involved.