A 200-Year-Old Idea Offers a New Way to Trace Stolen Bitcoins

Bitcoin's blockchain provides inalterable evidence, stored on thousands of computers, of every Bitcoin transaction that's ever taken place. Many of the transactions recorded on that distributed ledger are crimes: Billions of dollars in stolen funds, contraband deals, and paid ransoms sitting in plain sight, yet obscured by unidentifiable Bitcoin addresses and, in many cases, tangles of money laundering.

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