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.”

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    I don’t think this story is correct, just to chime in with everybody else. It was explicitly stated that bitcoin was a public ledger in the whitepaper.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•1 year ago

        That someone busted the myth of Bitcoin four years after it was made public knowledge that bitcoin was not anonymous.

        There was no myth to bust. Bitcoin was explicitly public from its inception.

        • massive_bereavement
          1•1 year ago

          I guess you hadn’t read the article. The point wasn’t that the ledger is public, but that the accounts allegedly were deemed anonymous.

          My point is read the article then criticize it.

          • Eager EagleEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            But it wasn’t deemed anonymous by anyone who read the bitcoin white paper from 2008. That’s the point… that was never a myth to bust because anonymity was never a promoted feature of this chain.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            I read it, the point is that people who hadn’t even read the basic information about Bitcoin presented by its creator assumed Bitcoin was anonymous.

            This is not as groundbreaking as you seem to think it is.

            Some people didn’t take the time to read closely or think critically and then made poor assumptions.

            Like you, for instance, with your comment.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year 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.