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

Published: April 5, 2018, 4:32 p.m.

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.