Have Crypto Detectives Killed the Cypherpunk Dream? - Ep. 461

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

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

Twitter

Writings for WIRED

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

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