The virtue of cryptocurrency was flouted in that word; Bitcoin, its progenitor, was described as anonymous and untraceable. It was meant to usher in a new age of faceless transactions as a means of giving its users freedom from the financial surveillance of business or government entities. Unsurprisingly, freedom lagged far behind unscrupulous criminality, and the first result was an influx on websites that offered the sales of illegal stuff with no consequences. Welcome to the 21st century!
As a journalist for Wired, Andy Greenberg was on the case early. He bought Bitcoin when it was cheap. And when the early dark web sites started showing up – for example Pirate Bay and The Silk Road – the IRS and law enforcement also wanted to track the webmasters down. It was supposed to be impossible. But given the structure of Bitcoin, all the data was there. An oddball group of academics and law enforcement officers managed break the unbreakable and trace the untraceable aided by online criminals who made what were in retrospect rookie errors.
It all comes together in Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which follows a twisted trail through four major busts featuring IRS-CI agents, Bakersfield cops, academics, start-up techno-geniuses, and a variety of mostly sort-of young men hoping to make it big. And they do, until they don’t.
Greenberg manages to keep up a sense of toe-tapping tension and inject it with a science-fictional sense-of-wonder. He keeps the info-dumps terse and enjoyably informative and crafts careful characters on both sides of the law and the readers’ moral sensibilities.
The cases he follows his LE protagonists through are varied in nature and engagingly explained. He masterfully combines true crime reporting with explorations of rapidly-maturing technologies as they are abused and analyzed for weaknesses by actors on all sides. He understands the appeal of anonymizing communication and the dangers of invisible surveillance, but is inclined present the facts he uncovers and leave readers to discover their own opinions.
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency is a compulsive experience that reads like a “cyber-thriller” with the thrills of being a non-fiction vision of our science-fiction present. We live in a world of unsuspected wonder with wonder-filled suspicion. The usual suspects are now quite unusual, hoping to remain quietly anonymous. Greenberg cuts through a variety of veils with a wickedly entertaining knife.
Andy Greenberg is clearly at home here in our non-anonymous future. Here’s a link to our conversation, or listen below, with an audience of non-anonymous spies.
Narrative Species 