Andy Greenberg, senior writer for WIRED and author of “Tracers in the Dark,” takes us inside the world of crypto-tracing crimebusters and voices the ambivalence of Bitcoin – a cypherpunk creation – eroding financial privacy. Hear how the longtime crypto scribe got law enforcement and sleuthing firms like Chainalysis to open up about their major wins in taking down darknet kingpins.

Show highlights:

why Andy thought early on that Bitcoin would enable crypto anarchy
how blockchain analytics started being used to tackle crime
why the IRS Criminal Investigation unit was more open to discussing its techniques
how Andy learned many new things about already well-known stories when writing about them for the book
the methods used to bring down the “biggest dark-web drug lord” in history
did AlphaBay’s Alexandre Cazes really kill himself in a Thai prison?
how researcher Sarah Meiklejohn developed tools to deanonymize Bitcoin
why she’s now uncomfortable that her techniques were adopted by Chainalysis and sold to law enforcement
what Andy feels about the importance of privacy
how Monero is harder to trace than Bitcoin but not untraceable
what the impact of zero-knowledge technology will be for blockchain analytics firms
whether the cypherpunk ethos is dead
why the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity will never die

Thank you to our sponsors!

Guest

Andy Greenberg, senior writer for WIRED and author of “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency”

Links:

WIRED:
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 1: The Shadow
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 2: Pimp_alex_91
The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Part 3: Alpha Male
De-Anonymization in Bitcoin with Sarah Meiklejohn | a16z crypto research talks
Wikipedia: Welcome to Video case

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nvidia, OpenAI Make $100 Billion Data Center Deal

Bloomberg Tech

UN Address, Investment Pledges and Tech Diplomacy

The AI-powered Podcast Player