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

by Andy Greenberg

Bitcoin, Andresen explained, was a “new kind of money,” one that allowed anyone to spend cash-like currency from their computer while using cryptography to ensure that no one could create counterfeit coins or fraudulently spend someone else’s. It had been invented by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto a few years earlier, he said, not long after the 2008 financial crisis, and it had been designed so that anyone could generate these bitcoins, too. They just had to run a so-called mining program on their own computer, performing calculations that entered them into a kind of automated lottery that distributed bitcoins to the winning computer every ten minutes. This kind of computational effort was the only way anyone could “mine” new bitcoins, and they could do it only at a predefined, globally limited rate. That scarcity made it the perfect currency for anyone suspicious of how governments control money—their ability to print cash willy-nilly, to fund wars, or to hand money to corporate friends. “With the global financial crisis and bank bailouts all over the world, a lot of us are starting to wonder: Can we really trust the people who control our money?” Andresen explained in his Ignite talk. “Satoshi didn’t. So he created Bitcoin.”