On this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Andy Greenberg, long-time WIRED reporter, about his new guide, Tracers within the Darkish: The World Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency.
That is Andy’s second writer interview on the Cyberlaw Podcast. He was additionally interviewed about an earlier guide, Sandworm: A New Period of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Harmful Hackers. They’re each wonderful cybersecurity tales.
Tracers within the Darkish is a form of sequel to the Silk Highway story, which ended with Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, pinioned to the desk in a San Francisco library, together with his laptop computer open to an administrator’s web page on the Silk Highway digital black market. At the moment, cryptocurrency backers believed that Ulbricht’s arrest was a fluke, and that, correctly applied, bitcoin was nameless and untraceable. Greenberg’s guide tells, story by story, how that phantasm was trashed by good cops and techies (together with our personal Nick Weaver!) who confirmed that the blockchain’s “ceaselessly” data make it nearly unattainable to keep away from attribution over time.
Amongst those that fell sufferer to the phantasm of anonymity had been: two federal officers who helped pursue Ulbricht – and to tear him off; the administrator of AlphaBay, Silk Highway’s successor as world’s greatest darkish market; an alleged Russian hacker who made a lot cash hacking Mt. Gox that he needed to create his personal trade to launder all of it; and tons of of kid intercourse abuse customers and producers.
It’s a nice story, and Andy brings it updated within the interview as we dig into two of the US authorities’s huge, multi-billion-dollar bitcoin seizures, each made potential by transaction tracing. Actually, for all of the colourful characters within the guide, the protagonist is absolutely Chainalysis and its rivals, who’ve turned tracing right into a form of science.
We shut the discuss by exploring Andy’s deeply combined emotions about each the world envisioned by cryptocurrency’s evangelists and the way in which Chainalysis is saving us from that world.
Obtain Bonus Episode 438 (mp3)
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