Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.

“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”

  • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    The point of the exchange in that context is to have a separate ledger. That is, to hide parts of the information, so that it is then impossible to relate information otherwise public.

    You cannot do that with a paper wallet. A wallet (cryptographic material) and a ledger (a collection of transfers - the blockchain being an example of one) are totally unrelated.