Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

PART I MEN WITH NO NAMES

CHAPTER
1
Eladio Guzman Fuentes

On September 27, 2013, four years before Chris Janczewski stepped into
that house in the Atlanta suburbs, someone moved 525 bitcoins. Those
coins, worth around $70,000 when they were sent but more than $15
million as of this writing,[*] traveled from one Bitcoin address identified by
a meaningless string of thirty-four characters to another address with an
equally long and meaningless identifier. More specifically, 15T7SagsD2J
qWUpBsiifcVuvyrQwX3Lq1e sent them to 1AJGTi3i2tPUg3ojwoHnd
DN1DYhJTWKSAA.
The transaction, like all Bitcoin transactions, happened silently, but not
at all secretly. The sender’s computer had sent out a message to nearby
computers in Bitcoin’s global network “announcing” the payment. Within
minutes the announcement had been passed to thousands of other machines
around the world, all of which confirmed that they’d witnessed it, adding it
into their copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, the unforgeable, unchangeable,
and altogether public ledger of who owns which bitcoins in the global
cryptocurrency economy. In fact, these witnesses noting the transaction in
their collective accounting of all bitcoins—agreed to by all of the
cryptocurrency’s users—represented the only meaningful sense in which

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg