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

by Andy Greenberg

Even today he says the sense remains with him that there are real elements of corruption and chaos in every society, that the “law of the land” he witnessed in Moscow lies just beneath the surface, everywhere, ready to emerge whenever people have a sense of impunity from consequences.

“Silk Road doesn’t really sell drugs, it sells insurance and financial products,” the Carnegie Mellon computer engineering professor Nicolas Christin put it at the time, expressing his amazement at the Silk Road’s smooth management of online transactions in an entirely new, anonymous medium. “It doesn’t really matter whether you’re selling T-shirts or cocaine. The business model is to commoditize security.”

Levin shook the IRS-CI supervisor’s hand. As he did, he thought again of the blockchain’s bounty of evidence: the countless cases left to crack, the millions of cryptocurrency transactions eternally preserved in amber, and the golden age of criminal forensics it presented to any investigator ready to excavate them.