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Andy Greenberg – a technology journalist – has a new book called “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency.”
Andy Greenberg Has a New BTC Book Coming Out
The book details an incident earlier in 2021 where Colonial Pipeline was hacked by cyber thieves who demanded bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in exchange for their release. The Department of Justice (DOJ) was able to recover half of the payments sent and retrieve the funds, so the thieves received far less money than they expected.
This book is proof of crypto’s traceability, which is often labeled as anonymous and immune to prying eyes. Greenberg claims this is untrue and discusses the matter in detail in the book.
He explains that the way traceability happens is when agencies collapse bitcoin addresses into a single identity. He said there are certain patterns that occur on the blockchain, even when transactors use multiple addresses to send or receive crypto funds, and organizations like the DOJ can now read those patterns more easily and find out who the money is going to. and who did it come from. They can then intervene if necessary.
In the book, Greenberg writes:
In bitcoin, for better and for worse, everyone witnesses every payment… [which] offers a very large data set to analyze. Who can say what kind of patterns might give users who think they’re smarter than those who watch them?
One of the big “characters” in this book is a woman named Sarah Meiklejohn, who studied at the University of California at San Diego in 2011. Working towards getting her PhD, Sarah heard about bitcoin while focusing on privacy research, and she became intrigued by the technology behind it.
Finding Patterns
In looking more broadly at blockchain, he was able to decipher many of the patterns the book covered and that agencies like the Department of Justice can now draw upon when studying criminal activity. Greenberg writes:
It scans its blockchain database for every multi-input transaction, linking all double, triple, or even hundredfold input to a single identity. The result immediately reduced the number of potential bitcoin users from twelve million to the present to around five million, cutting the problem by more than half… Many bitcoin wallets only allow the shopper to pay in full [number] coin sitting at a specific address. Each address is like that piggy bank [must] smashed open to spend coins inside. Spend less than the entire amount in that piggy bank and the rest [must] deposited in the newly created piggy bank.
Crypto crime has become a much bigger subject after the fall of FTX.
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