Lauren Good : Oh, when I buy something in cryptocurrency, I just go to my coffee shop in the morning and I open up MetaMask and say, "Hey, do you take BTC or ETH or GoodCoin?" I told him.
Michael Color : Yes.
Lauren Good : No, I don't do that and I don't think much about anonymous leaders, even though I know that's a big part of cryptocurrency, right?
Michael Color : That's it. The common belief is that people don't know what they're buying, how much they're spending, or even making a deal when they use it, but that's actually a myth.
Lauren Hood : Interesting.
Michael Color : Yes. Want to know more?
Lauren Hood : Absolutely.
Michael Calor : Then we bring our guest.
[Play Widget Lab Theme Music ]
Michael Calor : Hello everyone, and welcome to the Gadget Lab. I'm Michael Color. I'm an editor at WIRED.
Lauren Hood : And I'm Lauren Hood. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calor: Joining us again this week is Andy Greenberg, WIRED writer. Andy, welcome to the show.
Andy Greenberg : Thank you both for getting back to me.
Michael Calor : Good to see you again. We're going to talk about cryptocurrency again on today's show, but not what you might expect. Andy, you published a book late last year. It's called Tractors in the Dark . It is full of stories about how detectives track down criminals by studying their cryptocurrency transactions. These are the people who worked on dark web sites like Silk Road, Alphabet, and Welcome to Video, where users shared videos of pedophilia. These criminal enterprises are funded and undermined by cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin has been around, people are using it to buy and sell all kinds of legal and illegal things online. If you are doing something illegal, you may not consider this behavior dangerous because you believe that Bitcoin transactions are invisible. Well, that was never true, but that belief still remains. Andy, the myth of anonymity surrounding crypto is a recurring theme in your book. How was this legend born?
Andy Greenberg : Well, I have to admit that I was a part of it in some way. In the year I wrote my first print magazine article on Bitcoin in 2011 - luckily, not for WIRED magazine. I was working at Forbes magazine at the time. I was roaming, lurking and stalking the anonymous world and I came across this new phenomenon. Bitcoin has been described to me as an anonymous, anonymous form of digital currency for the Internet. I have talked to some early Bitcoin developers and even Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, wrote in this email in the crypto mailing list, among other things, participants in the new world of cryptocurrency can be anonymous, let it be. Describe them or who. So I wrote this first article back in 2011. It's 2011, and in this Forbes article, I'll describe what an anonymous digital currency looks like. If you're feeling smart, you can put blank bills in a purse and send them online anonymously. Of course, being the journalist that I am, I thought this would open up online money laundering, drug trafficking, and, I don't know, terrorist financing. All this happened in a certain way in the years that followed, because it seemed ... and it wasn't just for me. Even Satoshi Nakamoto believed that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general would have these unknown properties as cryptocurrencies became popular. It wasn't until 2020 that I said I would continue for at least ten years that I realized how wrong I was about this. I wasn't wrong, I was actually quite the opposite - that Bitcoin is completely predictable. In fact, it's much easier to follow the money when you can hack the blockchain and decrypt it with cryptocurrencies than with traditional finance. When the Department of Justice recognized this company, Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency monitoring company, after the announcement, I began to delve into the world of detectives who had captured it before me. I've seen this small team of detectives in law enforcement learn to track cryptocurrency many times and use it to stop cybercriminals' operations after massive cybercriminal activity over the past 10 years. This increasing mass attack and elimination are traces in the darkness of the history of this book.
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