cryptocurrency

Review: The digital sleuths who demystified cryptocurrency

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By FRANK BAJAK
December 5, 2022

“Tracers In The Dark” by Andy Greenberg (Doubleday)

The year was 2011. Cryptocurrency was a little-understood novelty, and Sen. Chuck Schumer called a news conference to vent outrage over a one-stop online shop for illegal drugs whose technology made sellers “virtually untraceable.”

The New York lawmaker’s description of Silk Road helped seed a persisting myth that technology reporter Andy Greenberg exhaustively dispels in “Tracers in the Dark,” that transactions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can’t be tracked.

Greenberg sketches the evolution of a wholly new discipline in the surprisingly lively real-life police procedural, following law officers and programmers who invent and deploy cryptocurrency-tracking tools to catch a new breed of criminal. They take down Silk Road and other “dark web” markets and merchants, finger crypto money launderers and snare the sysadmin and users of Welcome to Video, a major South-Korea-based distributor of child sexual abuse material.

Best of the action are two takedown dramas. A young Quebecois behind the AlphaBay dark web market, Alexandre Cazes, lives large in Thailand, rocketing around in a Lamborghini, running up $12,000 restaurant bills and boasting of adulterous sexploits online. The other takedown is of a DEA agent and a Secret Service agent who illegally enriched themselves off Silk Road while investigating it – each wholly on their own.

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Bitcoin: More about philosophy than finance

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Alan Feuer got it right in today’s NYTimes. The virtual digital currency Bitcoin was not chiefly created as a money-making venture.

“To its creators and numerous disciples, bitcoin is — and always has been — a mostly ideological undertaking, more philosophy than finance,” he writes.

All that we’re reading about Bitcoins getting stolen from digital wallets is not anywhere near as interesting as who is recognizing them as currency.

Bitcoin is news because it is disruptive. It embodies a throwing down of the gauntlet by a person or persons (Satoshi Nakamoto) fed up with how the global banking system _ comprised of “fiat” currencies created by nation-states – had fallen prey in 2008 to the machinations of greedy bankers and spineless politicians.

Satoshi was simply fed up with the banks deemed “too big to fail” that failed us all and whose bailout we bankrolled. Stateless digital currencies _ electronic cash as David Chaum envisioned it when he patented the idea in 1982 _ will allow us to develop new models for making payments that cut out the usurious middleman and democratize the economy.

And the key, of course, is public-key cryptography. Want to geek out on how a Bitcoin transation works?  Try this illustration from IEEE Spectrum: “The CryptoAnarchists’ Answer to Cash.”