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
    206·
    10 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.