In this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Andy Greenberg, long-time WIRED reporter, about his new book, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency.
This is Andy's second author interview on the Cyberlaw Podcast. He was also interviewed about an earlier book, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. They are both excellent cybersecurity stories.
Tracers in the Dark is a kind of sequel to the Silk Road story, which ended with Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, pinioned to the table in a San Francisco library, with his laptop open to an administrator's page on the Silk Road digital black market. At that time, cryptocurrency backers believed that Ulbricht's arrest was a fluke, and that, properly implemented, bitcoin was anonymous and untraceable. Greenberg's book tells, story by story, how that illusion was trashed by smart cops and techies (including our own Nick Weaver!) who showed that the blockchain's "forever" records make it almost impossible to avoid attribution over time.
