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.”

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    But it wasn’t deemed anonymous by anyone who read the bitcoin white paper from 2008. That’s the point… that was never a myth to bust because anonymity was never a promoted feature of this chain.