Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg

“Participants can be anonymous,” he had read. But if this blockchain truly recorded every transaction in the entire Bitcoin economy, then it sounded like the precise opposite of anonymity: a trail of bread crumbs left behind by every single payment. A forensic accountant’s dream.

Just as important to Gronager as that unfortunate calculation, however, was the apparent geography of the thieves’ transactions. Gronager broke down the times when the burglars’ coins were manually moved out of the wallets that held the stolen Mt. Gox funds, plotting the money movements across a twenty-four-hour cycle. All of them seemed to fall from morning to night in a certain time zone, one that lay a couple of hours east of Greenwich mean time and nowhere near the waking hours of the average person in Japan, where Mark Karpelès lived.