A review by socraticgadfly
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg
challenging
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
5.0
Fascinating, challenging and dark book.
I knew the basics of Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, and bits about Vinnik. I don't think I'd read at all about Alexandre Cazas and BTC-e.
It really gets dark, does the book, when it goes to Welcome to Video, which was using crypto not to peddle drugs, the occasional guns, and lots of stolen IDs, unlike the above, but was a hardcore child porn site, with its creator using various tools, such as insisting on "fresh" porn, to goose the buying.
Among the users? A school superintendent. Multiple Homeland Security agents.
And, yes, there's law enforcement corruption here.
There's also the folks of the IRS Criminal Investigations division, successors to the T-men who took down Capone. Greenberg does good work with them as people and characters. There's the Danish creator of Chainalysis, now the world's largest blockchain structure and chain tracer. And, there's libertarians and semi-libertarians who, while acknowledging all of the above problems with crypto, don't like Chainalysis for various reasons, either. (I largely agree with the thoughts of its founder toward their worries, and beyond that, what he may hint at, or at least that I take him as insinuating, that the utopian ideas of the early web, Internet 1.0 or even 0.0, were never going to remain that way. It's called human nature, folks.)
I knew the basics of Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, and bits about Vinnik. I don't think I'd read at all about Alexandre Cazas and BTC-e.
It really gets dark, does the book, when it goes to Welcome to Video, which was using crypto not to peddle drugs, the occasional guns, and lots of stolen IDs, unlike the above, but was a hardcore child porn site, with its creator using various tools, such as insisting on "fresh" porn, to goose the buying.
Among the users? A school superintendent. Multiple Homeland Security agents.
And, yes, there's law enforcement corruption here.
There's also the folks of the IRS Criminal Investigations division, successors to the T-men who took down Capone. Greenberg does good work with them as people and characters. There's the Danish creator of Chainalysis, now the world's largest blockchain structure and chain tracer. And, there's libertarians and semi-libertarians who, while acknowledging all of the above problems with crypto, don't like Chainalysis for various reasons, either. (I largely agree with the thoughts of its founder toward their worries, and beyond that, what he may hint at, or at least that I take him as insinuating, that the utopian ideas of the early web, Internet 1.0 or even 0.0, were never going to remain that way. It's called human nature, folks.)
This is a full 5-star book.