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
    0•10 months ago

    People don’t need an exchange either. Someone can create a physical paper wallet with no copy of its keys and who ever holds it owns it.

    Organized crime has existed for a while, the boss rarely gets their hands dirty and the grunt isn’t involved and in the know enough about the bigger crime to be charged too harshly if their part in it was discovered.

    • 7heoEnglish
      1•10 months ago

      The point of the exchange in that context is to have a separate ledger. That is, to hide parts of the information, so that it is then impossible to relate information otherwise public.

      You cannot do that with a paper wallet. A wallet (cryptographic material) and a ledger (a collection of transfers - the blockchain being an example of one) are totally unrelated.