I covered this world of anonymity and hackers and surveillance, and I came upon this new phenomenon. Bitcoin was described to me as a kind of untraceable, anonymous digital cash for the internet. I was talking with some of the first bitcoin developers, and even Satoshi Nakamoto, this mysterious creator of bitcoin, had written in this email to a cryptography mailing list that, among other things, participants can be anonymous in this new cryptocurrency world that he or she or whoever they are was describing. So I wrote this first piece in 2011, and I did describe in this Forbes piece how this seemed to be a kind of untraceable digital cash. You could put unmarked bills in a briefcase and send them across the internet to anybody without revealing your identity if you were careful, it seems. Of course, I immediately also was imagining, just being the kind of reporter I am, that this was going to unlock a whole world of money laundering and online drug deals and, I don’t know, terrorist financing. All of that, in some sense, did come to pass over the following years because it did seem … And it wasn’t just me. Even Satoshi Nakamoto believed that bitcoin and cryptocurrency more generally, as there became more flavors of cryptocurrency, had these anonymous properties. It was only, I would say, at least fast-forward a whole decade, around 2020, that I started to realize how completely wrong I was about this. How not just I was a little bit wrong, but actually 180 fully opposite of correct about this—that bitcoin is actually fully traceable. In fact, it is much easier to follow the money if you can crack and decipher the blockchain with cryptocurrency than even with traditional finance. It was actually when I started to see the Department of Justice credit this one company, Chainalysis, which is a cryptocurrency tracing firm, in one announcement after another, I started looking into this world of investigators who had figured this out much earlier than me. I saw that this small group of detectives had learned to trace cryptocurrency within law enforcements in many cases, and had used this to take down one massive cybercriminal operation after another over the last 10 years. That escalating spree of massive busts and takedowns is the story of this book, Tracers in the Dark.

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