Tracers in the Dark Quotes

“The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“As the Berkeley researcher Nick Weaver had warned, and as cryptocurrency users around the world were finally learning, “The blockchain is forever.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“The site’s handling of cryptocurrency seemed to be designed by someone who still held the antiquated belief that Bitcoin was magically untraceable—when, in fact, the opposite was often true.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Even the crowded movie theater trick, it turns out, breaks down when the robber is carrying a large enough sack of loot and the cops are watching every exit.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“The two prosecutors could hardly believe it. The man they had come to Bangkok to arrest had, entirely by chance, arrived at a meeting at the exact hotel where they were staying and sat down at the table next to them. He still had no idea they were on his trail.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“The little green light next to Rawmeo’s name wasn’t merely a reminder that they were seeing into Cazes’s thoughts in real time. It might also serve as an indicator of when his laptop was open—and when Alpha02 was vulnerable.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“By the end of 2016, Chainalysis had labeled more than 2.5 million addresses as part of AlphaBay’s wallet.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“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.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“So, as Meiklejohn’s first step, she simply tried the technique Satoshi had inadvertently suggested—across every Bitcoin payment ever carried out. She scanned her blockchain database for every multi-input transaction, linking all of those double, triple, or even hundredfold inputs to single identities. The result immediately reduced the number of potential Bitcoin users from twelve million to date to around five million, slicing away more than half of the problem.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“For weeks on end, Meiklejohn combed through those transactions while simultaneously tagging the vendors, services, markets, and other recipients on the other end of her hundreds of test transactions.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Around the same time, a user with the same handle had also asked for programming help on a coding forum. On that page, altoid had listed his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Someone going by the name “altoid” had posted to a site called the Shroomery in January 2011 recommending the Silk Road’s just-launched dark web market as a source for drugs.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“But Sanchez remained in Bangkok.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“And, I ask, how would she sum up that public service announcement? “If you really care about privacy,” Meiklejohn says, “don’t use Bitcoin.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“The two men, like the Dread Pirate Roberts they were hunting, had been seduced by the same siren song: the false promise of untraceable money.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“any use of Bitcoin as a tool for cryptoanarchy or crime was a misguided sideshow”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“That is the date,” Weaver says, “that you can state unequivocally that law enforcement learned that the blockchain is forever.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“For a moment, Gambaryan and Der-Yeghiayan sat on the phone in silence. Gambaryan had just, for the very first time in a U.S. criminal investigation, traced cryptocurrency payments to prove someone’s guilt. “Oh, shit,” Gambaryan remembers thinking. “We broke Bitcoin.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Those branching and converging money flows, he thought, looked familiar: They struck Gambaryan as the typical, contrived complexity of someone splitting up and reassembling their illicit funds in the hopes of throwing an auditor off their trail.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“colleague had laughed at him. “Oh, so we’re going to bring in Satoshi Nakamoto to introduce the blockchain as evidence in court?” the agent had joked.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Far from being untraceable, they wrote, the blockchain was an open book that could identify vast swaths of transactions between people, many of whom thought they were acting anonymously.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“one-page article about Bitcoin in an April 2011 issue of Forbes, perhaps the most high-profile press the budding cryptocurrency had gotten up to that point.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Americans don’t know how good they have it,” Gambaryan says. “You let it slip, it turns into the chaos that I saw.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“in plain sight for years. When Alford pointed this out to colleagues, they struggled to believe that Google alone could unveil the world’s most mysterious digital drug lord. It had taken more than a month for the FBI, DEA, and DOJ staff assigned to the investigation to even take the IRS agent’s lead seriously. Ultimately, his discovery had cracked the case.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency