How a 27-year-old codebreaker busted the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity
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Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. This week, WIRED Start takes a look at the story of a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn who proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.
“You could never prove anything about the privacy properties of this system. If you don’t get privacy, what do you get?”
Just over a decade ago, Bitcoin appeared to many of its adherents to be the crypto-anarchist holy grail: truly private digital cash for the internet.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the cryptocurrency’s mysterious and unidentifiable inventor, had stated in an email introducing Bitcoin that “participants can be anonymous.” And the Silk Road dark-web drug market seemed like living proof of that potential, enabling the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs and other contraband for bitcoin while flaunting its impunity from law enforcement.
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.
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Account Executive specializing in HPC, AI, Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Research Data Acceleration Platform at VDURA
1yOh the irony! WIRED has published several articles indicating #BTC is, in fact, traceable.
Creating the Possible
1yWhat? Bitcoin never claimed to be a privacy coin. It’s a public blockchain coun, every bitcoin may be traced back to inception. Don’t confuse it with privacy coins, which claim to be untraceable
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1yhttps://linktr.ee/Srilankaroundtrip