HOW A 27-YEAR-OLD CODEBREAKER BUSTED THE MYTH OF BITCOIN’S ANONYMITY

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

This excerpt from 'Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency' tells the story of how Sarah Meiklejohn discovered that Bitcoin could be deanonymized. While Meiklejohn was a PhD student at UCSD, she became fascinated by the privacy claims made by users, developers, and even the creator of Bitcoin. Slowly via experimentation, she discovered methods to link together disparate transactions and form chains of payments that are critical to modern-day crypto tracking operations.