At the 2025 Bitwarden Open Source Security Summit, WIRED's Andy Greenberg sat down for a fireside chat with GigaOm analyst Paul Stringfellow to discuss a revelation that turned his decades-long reporting on its head: Bitcoin became a criminal's worst nightmare.
In 2011, Greenberg thought he'd discovered the story of a lifetime: digital cash that promised complete anonymity. A decade later, that story flipped entirely.
"I had this slow-motion epiphany that I was entirely wrong about Bitcoin. It was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable."
How law enforcement cracked the blockchain code
Starting around 2014, law enforcement discovered something remarkable: Bitcoin's blockchain was a permanent, traceable record.
Enter Tigran Gambaryan, an IRS criminal investigator who would become the hero of Greenberg's book Tracers in the Dark. The same IRS unit that brought down Al Capone for tax evasion now had a new weapon: blockchain forensics. Working alongside cryptocurrency tracing startup Chainalysis, Gambaryan developed techniques that offered even greater transparency than traditional financial systems.
"They could follow the money with even greater financial forensic power than in the traditional finance system."
The scale of what followed was staggering. Greenberg walked through several landmark cases that reshaped how law enforcement thinks about cryptocurrency:
Silk Road's corruption : Corrupt DEA and Secret Service agents received Bitcoin payments from the site's kingpin. Blockchain analysis proved these weren't personal investments — they were payments to moles selling law enforcement secrets.
Mt. Gox heist : Investigators traced 650,000 stolen Bitcoins to Russian cybercriminals, leading to arrests when one vacationed in Greece.
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