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.”

  • daniskarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
    384·
    10 months ago

    Transactions are public. But wallet ownership is not.

    That’s why it’s widely used in cybercrime. You can make a wallet and authorities may know which wallet receibe the money, but it may be imposible to link that wallet with an actual person.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      And it becomes much, much easier to track down and remove anonymity the moment real currency transactions are made. Because of KYC requirements, the only way to stay anonymous with crypto is to keep your crypto transactions entirely outside of the real world. Once your digital anonymous currency interacts with real money you’ve not anchored your wallet to your identity.