Untraceable Bitcoin Is a Myth

How did the Justice Department recover $2.3 million of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to a group of hackers known as DarkSide? Isn’t bitcoin, the cryptocurrency in which the payment was made, supposed to be untraceable? Actually, no. Bitcoin is anonymous, but it’s far from private—an important but often overlooked distinction. The Justice Department recovered more than $1 billion in bitcoin in various investigations during 2020 alone.

The blockchain—bitcoin’s historical ledger of all transactions—is publicly viewable at all times by anyone, so that there can’t be any under-the-table cash transactions. Software firms such as Chainalysis and Elliptic have supported federal investigators with a suite of analysis tools intended to help trace criminals and tax cheats, including those who try to obscure the bitcoin trail through dozens of successive transactions.