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.”

  • Eager EagleEnglish
    58•10 months ago

    This has to be the most convoluted way of saying someone clustered wallet addresses of a public blockchain. I’m sure there’s much more to her work, but this beats so much around the bush… I’m not going to speculate on the author’s motivations for this article, I’ll just say I wouldn’t waste (more) time on it.

    • @dylanmorgan@slrpnk.netEnglish
      22•10 months ago

      The article’s point appears to be an ad for the book written by the same dude whose byline is on the article.

      • Eager EagleEnglish
        5•10 months ago

        that makes more sense, considering I felt like reading a darn book that never gets to the point