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.

“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”

  • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    11 months ago

    The main purpose is to give privacy to digital transactions. Money laundering exists at a much larger scale within institutional banks like Deutsche and Credit Suisse (RIP)