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.”

  • maness300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1512·
    11 months ago

    Yeah, but retrieving actual useful currency from that wallet becomes nearly impossible.

    Then how do people set up drug empires built around it?

    Use your brains.