Bitcoin’s biggest blackmarket bust

How the seemingly anonymous nature of Bitcoin led the IRS to take down the largest global pedophilia network in history.

Ask anyone 10 years ago about Bitcoin and they’d describe it as ‘anonymous digital cash’ – but according to a new book by Wired writer Andy Greenberg, there’s an assumption in that description that couldn’t have been more wrong. While the mysterious cryptocurrency creator Satoshi Nakamoto suggested in 2008 that one of the five fundamental principles of Bitcoin was that “Participants can be anonymous”, one of the other essential components of the cryptocurrency was that the process of generating new coins was baked into the creation and validation of a public ledger called the blockchain. This detail means that every exchange of the cryptocurrency all the way back to the very first transaction has been permanently etched into the very number sequences that make up the currency, and while initially…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2022

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