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.”

  • 520@kbin.social
    497·
    9 months ago

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

    • massive_bereavement@kbin.social
      242·
      9 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·
        9 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.