Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Periodically, the door would open, the light would turn on, and a petite, dark-haired graduate student named Sarah Meiklejohn would enter the room and add to the growing piles of miscellaneous artifacts. Then Meiklejohn would walk back out the door, down the hall, up the stairs, and into an office she shared with other graduate students at the UC San Diego computer science department. One wall of the room was almost entirely glass, and it looked out onto the sunbaked vista of Sorrento Valley and the rolling hills beyond. But Meiklejohn’s desk faced away from that expanse. She was wholly focused on the screen of her laptop, where she was quickly becoming one of the strangest, most hyperactive Bitcoin users in the world.
Meiklejohn had personally purchased every one of the dozens of items in the bizarre, growing collection in the UCSD closet using bitcoin, buying each one almost at random from a different vendor who accepted the cryptocurrency. And between those ecommerce orders and trips to the storage room, she was performing practically every other task that a person could carry out with bitcoin, all at once, like a kind of cryptocurrency fanatic having a manic episode.
She moved money into and out of 10 different bitcoin wallet services and converted dollars to bitcoins on more than two dozen exchanges such as Bitstamp, Mt. Gox, and Coinbase. She wagered those coins on 13 different online gambling services, with names like Satoshi Dice and Bitcoin Kamikaze. She contributed her computer’s mining power to 11 different mining “pools,” groups that collected users’ computing power for mining bitcoins and then paid them a share of the profits. And, again and again, she moved bitcoins into and then out of accounts on the Silk Road, the first-ever dark-web drug market, without ever actually buying any drugs.
In all, Meiklejohn carried out 344 cryptocurrency transactions over the course of a few weeks. With each one, she carefully noted on a spreadsheet the amount, the Bitcoin address she had used for it, and then, after digging up the transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain and examining the public record of the payment, the address of the recipient or sender.
Meiklejohn’s hundreds of purchases, bets, and seemingly meaningless movements of money were not, in fact, signs of a psychotic break. Each was a tiny experiment, adding up to a study of a kind that had never been attempted before. After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.
All of her meticulous, manual transactions were time-consuming and tedious. But Meiklejohn had time to kill: As she was carrying them out and recording the results, her computer was simultaneously running queries on a massive database stored on a server that she and her fellow UCSD researchers had set up, algorithms that sometimes took as long as 12 hours to spit out results. The database represented the entire Bitcoin blockchain, the roughly 16 million transactions that had occurred across the entire Bitcoin economy since its creation four years earlier. For weeks on end, Meiklejohn combed through those transactions while simultaneously tagging the vendors, services, markets, and other recipients on the other end of her hundreds of test transactions.
When she had started that process of probing the Bitcoin ecosystem, Meiklejohn had seen her work almost as anthropology: What were people doing with bitcoin? How many of them were saving the cryptocurrency versus spending it? But as her initial findings began to unfold, she had started to develop a much more specific goal, one that ran exactly counter to crypto-anarchists’ idealized notion of bitcoin as the ultimate privacy-preserving currency of the dark web: She aimed to prove, beyond any doubt, that bitcoin transactions could very often be traced. Even when the people involved thought they were anonymous.
Related Stories
When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email.
[...]
The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.
[...]
Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."
[...]
The search for the creator of Bitcoin has dragged into its orbit a colorful cast of characters, among them Hal Finney, recipient of the first ever bitcoin transaction; Adam Back, designer of a precursor technology cited in the Bitcoin white paper; and cryptographer Nick Szabo, to name just a few. Journalists at Newsweek, The New York Times, and WIRED, among others, have all taken stabs at solving the Satoshi riddle. But irrefutable proof has never been unearthed.
[...]
The case for Sassaman was first outlined in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman bubbles periodically to the surface, the spotlight is thrown on his widow, software developer Meredith Patterson, who believes the theory is unfounded."People used to be really fucking nosy and entitled. I'd get people writing me with a two-page list of dates and locations, asking where I was at such and such a time or place," says Patterson. "Where do you get off? A complete stranger walking up to a widow and trying to interrogate her. It's like, fuck off Sergeant Joe Friday."
[...]
"I was relieved for myself and my family that they named Peter Todd," says Patterson. "But I feel sorry for Peter Todd. Frankly, nobody deserves getting a target painted on their back."
[...]
Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern—and the reason he has gone into hiding.
[...]
Hoback sees things very differently. Though there have been cases where violent extortionists have targeted crypto holders, plenty of people have been unmasked as Satoshi before—and nothing terrible is known to have happened to them, he argues. "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback.
The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.
Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too.
Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems.
Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hopdevil on Friday January 19 2024, @05:40PM (10 children)
It is and always has been entirely the opposite of anonymous.. every transaction is perfectly recorded into it's ledger, shared to all. If you want anonymity, use cash.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday January 19 2024, @06:05PM
It's anonymous as long as nobody can link your bitcoin address to your real identity.
The problem is, there is a million and a half way to do that - chief of which is exchanging the pretend money with real one, since that usually entails supplying a real bank account number linked to your real name.
So unless you take a wealth of precautions to handle your funny money in a way that doesn't tie the transations to unique properties that can deanonymize you *and* you pay everything in funny money without ever converting it to real money, you're essentially as good as identified by any actor with enough resources.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2024, @06:14PM (5 children)
I can't see your cash transactions, but I'm dubious about the notion that authorities can't see them. Every bill has a serial number. Surely the ATM is tracking those. Stores aren't, but when the armored truck picks up and the bank counts notes, that would be a potential way of tracking cash. At the very least, it seems like they could get an approximate location for somebody who stole a bunch of cash from a bank and is routinely spending it.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 19 2024, @06:34PM (3 children)
Observe the cashier at your favorite store putting your cash you just payed in her drawer.
If she puts banknotes in "inefficiently" one by one (not as packet of the same values), she's doing that because she's instructed to do so.
That means, the drawer has reading camera(s) inside and your cash is already being tracked. Probably also validated too.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2024, @07:48PM (1 child)
There is a much less paranoid assumption for why a cashier would do something like this, which is simply to count the bills as they are put into the register to ensure that none are missing. Especially nowadays, when cashiers don't do things like counting bills and change particularly often.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2024, @09:56PM
If you'd ever worked retail you would know that is crap. When a customer pays cash you drop it in a separate place and give the change before putting the notes/coins away. Otherwise you get customers saying "I gave you a twenty and you gave me change for a ten".
(Score: 4, Informative) by cereal_burpist on Saturday January 20 2024, @02:45AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday January 19 2024, @10:01PM
In the Netherlands, the Dutch national bank, which issues and processes banknotes, routinely reads the serial numbers of all bills that come in through the banking system before they send them out again. What they are looking for is serial numbers that show up too often. Those are probably counterfeit. When it happens, further duplicates are removed from circulation as they show up.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2024, @07:06PM (1 child)
> After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.
And it only took her 344 transactions to prove the lack of anonymity. Proponents of how "safely anonymous" BTC was at the time were seemingly under the impression that it was an insurmountable task, similar to breaking the ECC that protects the wallets... the protocol was right there for everyone to read: no double spends = no anonymity. Your exchange of BTC is recorded as if you were using cash, and every single person who ever touched the cash kept a permanent, globally shared, digitally processable record of every serial number on every bill they ever touched.
Who would think such a thing could be anonymous?
Probably the same people who don't realize their IP address is traceable.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2024, @09:30AM
It's strange that this "news" is appearing in 2024. Did someone just wake up from a decade long coma or something?
After all she did it in 2013 more than 10 years ago:
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf [ucsd.edu]
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=GzV9aJkAAAAJ&citation_for_view=GzV9aJkAAAAJ:_FxGoFyzp5QC [google.com]
Given the way Bitcoin was known to work you'd be stupid to believe it was anonymous even before her paper. Her paper is more about showing how easy/difficult it was.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2024, @09:27AM
Those with a clue knew that Bitcoin isn't anonymous, we just never bothered trying to get research funding etc. Maybe the FBI did something similar in secret.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Friday January 19 2024, @05:44PM (5 children)
That is probably 16 billion transaction. Seems to be a non-technical puff piece.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Friday January 19 2024, @06:25PM (1 child)
Even 16 billion transactions is nothing.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions-total [blockchain.com]
But reality is closer to 1 billion. In a city of 1 million, this is only 1000 transactions per person. Since bitcoin creation, I've participated in more transactions than this, by far. Even if you 4x that for average family size, still exceeding that. And this is assuming "CURRENCY OF A CITY". BTC is clearly useless as any sort of large scale currency transaction ledger simply since it doesn't scale. 7000 million people would outstrip the current number of transactions in *hours*. Completely unmanageable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2024, @07:09PM
I always thought that everybody should have their own personal blockchain(s), for scalability among other things.
http://mangocats.com/ao/IslandLife.html [mangocats.com]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by fliptop on Friday January 19 2024, @08:47PM
I just finished reading the whole article, apparently all this occurred in 2012-2013. The article mentions at the end that:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday January 19 2024, @10:14PM
Seeing as how the number of bitcoin transactions per day didn't reach the tens of thousands until 2012 and was still in the tens of thousands in 2013, 16 million total transactions by 2013 seems about right.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/ [statista.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Saturday January 20 2024, @02:05AM
Close to a billion over the whole history, and see rates at https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_transactions_per_day [ycharts.com]
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 19 2024, @07:32PM (1 child)
Just outlaw 27 year old college students. She shouldn't be snooping through all that anonymized data!
You think I'm kidding, right? Let a bunch of congress critters get wind of this, sit back, and watch the circus.
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 19 2024, @08:22PM
>She shouldn't be snooping through all that anonymized data!
This is _exactly_ how HIPAA works.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]