How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity

Sarah Meiklejohn, a UC San Diego graduate student, showed in 2013 that Bitcoin transactions could often be traced, contrary to the belief that the currency was anonymous. To test this, she made 344 purchases, bets and transfers with bitcoin over a few weeks, recording each sender and recipient address after examining the public blockchain. The excerpt says her work, which drew on a database of roughly 16 million transactions, helped set off a new era of crypto criminal justice, including the tracing that enabled major law enforcement seizures. The excerpt is drawn from the book Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg.