> “Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain, and that we will not allow cryptocurrency to be a safe haven for money laundering or a zone of lawlessness within our financial system,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
How is this not a total death blow for bitcoin? If the justice department can do it, anyone can. It's a public ledger. So you effectively must treat every transaction you ever make on the blockchain as totally public and tied directly to you.
It took them 6 years to catch these perps. And these perps were extremely sloppy (storing keys in cloud, weak encryption)
Justice must give the perception that they are doing enough. They can't really say that it's really hard to catch people committing crimes in cryptocurrencies.
How is this not a total death blow for bitcoin? If the justice department can do it, anyone can. It's a public ledger. So you effectively must treat every transaction you ever make on the blockchain as totally public and tied directly to you.