How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/
Meiklejohn’s hundreds of purchases, bets, and seemingly meaningless movements of money were not, in fact, signs of a psychotic break. Each was a tiny experiment, adding up to a study of a kind that had never been attempted before. After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.
https://www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/