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.”

  • mercEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    There’s a difference between “bitcoin is a public ledger” and “we can determine that Alice paid Bob 1 bitcoin”.

    The bitcoin devs thought they could achieve the “public ledger” part while avoiding the second part. It turns out they couldn’t.