Ryan's Reviews > Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

This is a great book from an amazing technology journalist -- specifically covering the tools and procedures used to trace cryptocurrency transactions (e.g. Bitcoin) for law enforcement purposes.

Despite the public protestations of law enforcement (and some Bitcoin advocates) Bitcoin isn't even as private as regular banking systems -- it's a global public transparent ledger of pseudonyms, fully linkable through connections to external systems, patterns, and "metadata" analysis. We're currently living in a privacy dark age valley of "too late for physical bearer assets, too soon for Zero Knowledge online assets". Cryptocurrency has an edge in being permissionless and censorship resistant in many cases, but it's far from private as deployed today.

This book shows through tracing dark net markets participants (Silk Road, AlphaBay, and others), exchanges, and other bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions what the true state of privacy on the blockchain is. A major element is the founding and history of Chainalysis, one of the first dedicated tracing firms, from the tracing of loss Mt Gox exchange assets, but there's also extensive coverage of various law enforcement agencies and how they use traditional forensic accounting techniques, as well as chain analysis tools and subpoena and other investigatory powers, to find undesirable activity.

It was a little disappointing that de-anonymizing Monero transactions and other more privacy focused transactions wasn't more of a focus, but this is probably not covered as much in open forums.

The book and writing style focuses on personalities and events, rather than technology, so it's approachable and interesting for a general audience, but as an expert in the field (I work for a cryptoasset insurance company and have been involved in anonymous electronic cash since the mid 1990s), it's technically accurate as well.

Strongly recommend.