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Andy Greenberg on “Tracers in the Dark,” Bitcoin What-ifs and IRS Heroes
Guest:
Andy Greenberg
Published:
Updated:
Duration:
37 min
Episode summary
Journalist Andy Greenberg is no stranger to the murky world of cryptocurrency. The senior writer for WIRED and longtime cybersecurity journalist was one of the last reporters to interact with pseudonymous Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto before they evidently ceased communications.
In his new book, “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency,” Andy follows the gripping story of IRS special agent Tigran Gambaryan as he follows the money to zero in on some of the most mysterious and monstrous criminals in the cyber underground.
Don’t miss the inaugural episode of WE’RE IN! Season 2 to hear more from Andy on:
How Tigran joined forces with expert investigators and cryptographers to jettison misconceptions about the anonymity of major cryptocurrencies, exposing alleged criminal masterminds in the process
The genesis of successful crypto tracing and analysis firms like Chainalysis
The twisted motivations of those who founded infamous dark web emporiums like AlphaBay and Silk Road
Bitcoin is a public ledger, not anonymity Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain between addresses. Once addresses are clustered and tied to an identity, for example through an exchange subpoena, past activity can be traced.
Early research exposed the anonymity myth Sarah Meiklejohn and her UCSD coauthors published work in 2013 showing how to cluster Bitcoin addresses, but it took years for the wider community to absorb the finding.
Tracing alone cracked major cases In the Welcome to Video case, cryptocurrency tracing led to arrests of hundreds of users in about a dozen countries and the rescue of 23 children.
The IRS played a central role IRS criminal investigators, essentially forensic accountants, drove many of these cases, including locating the AlphaBay server with Chainalysis.
Traceability cuts both ways Greenberg is uneasy that the escape from financial surveillance Bitcoin seemed to offer turned out to be a trap, and does not want the book read only as a pro law enforcement story.
Notable quotes
Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable. It was, in fact, an extremely traceable form of money, and it served as a trap for almost a full decade…
23 children were rescued, and it was all almost exclusively through cryptocurrency tracing that it was possible.
And the fact that that escape valve turned out to be a trap is not an entirely happy story…
Questions this episode answers
Is Bitcoin anonymous?
No. Greenberg says he realized fully around 2020 that Bitcoin is an extremely traceable form of money that served as a trap for more than a decade for people seeking privacy, especially criminals. Read this section
How do investigators trace Bitcoin transactions?
Researchers like Sarah Meiklejohn found ways to cluster addresses owned by the same person and link clusters to identities. Law enforcement can then subpoena cryptocurrency exchanges for identifying information. Read this section
What was the Welcome to Video case?
It was a dark web market for child sexual abuse material whose users paid in Bitcoin. Tracing those payments led to hundreds of arrests in about a dozen countries and the rescue of 23 children. Read this section
Was Hal Finney Satoshi Nakamoto?
Greenberg once suspected Hal Finney was involved because he lived near Dorian Nakamoto, but after visiting Finney, who denied it and showed evidence, Greenberg concluded he was not Satoshi. Read this section
Why does the IRS feature so heavily in Tracers in the Dark?
IRS criminal investigators were central to many of the cases, and Greenberg likes underdog stories. He also found the IRS more willing to talk than the FBI, partly because it wanted credit for its work. Read this section
About the guest
Andy Greenberg is a journalist who, at the time of recording, was a senior writer for WIRED and had covered cybersecurity for about fifteen years. He is the author of Sandworm and of Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which follows IRS special agent Tigran Gambaryan. In 2011 he wrote an early print magazine story on Bitcoin for Forbes and received a decline to comment from Satoshi Nakamoto through Gavin Andresen.
And I'm Blake Thompson-Heuer. And can I just say I am so excited to kick off season two of WE'RE IN here with you, Bella? We have lots of awesome guests lined up, including one very special guest who we'll introduce shortly. But first, wanted to ask you, what's on your bookshelf these days?
Good question. I have been on a little bit of a nonfiction kick. I'm just trying to learn a bunch, I guess. I recently read a book about how the universe might end. You know, just casual, fun, light reading. What about you?
I've also been on a bit of a non fiction kick. I've been reading a little bit about the year 1968, when I was about negative 20. But on the cyber front, I recently had the pleasure of reading Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which is a new book out from Andy Greenberg.
And we are thrilled to be welcoming Andy as our first guest for season two. He's an accomplished journalist, author, and all around investigator extraordinaire who penned the definitive book on the Russian cyber threat Sandworm.
Andy's latest book takes us deep into the secret lives of crypto crime lords and the global law enforcement authorities and technologists charged with tracking them down. And they can be tracked, and that's a really interesting point that we'll unpack with him. It's really gripping stuff.
But before we get to sit down with Andy, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor, Synack. WE'RE IN is brought to you by Synack, the premier crowdsourced platform for on demand security expertise. Synack delivers twenty four seven pen testing, intelligence, and vulnerability management from a global network of vetted and trusted researchers. Their work is enhanced by smart technologies to accelerate your critical cybersecurity missions. Synack gives businesses the best chance of finding every vulnerability that matters. Find out more at synack.com. That's synack.com. So first of all, Andy, super, super excited to talk with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.
So first of all, I just want to say I have been super excited about your new book. I really like the title and haven't finished it, but I'm in the first section. I'm like mostly done with the first section. And I was immediately hooked. Like it is exciting right off the bat. And so for listeners who maybe are new to the subject, I'm wondering if you can tell us what is the biggest misconception about cryptocurrency?
Well, the whole notion of this book really is that when I first discovered for myself this phenomenon called Bitcoin in 2011, I was among the many people who believed that what was special about this was that it was an anonymous, untraceable currency for the internet that... Even Satoshi Nakamoto himself or herself had written in an email introducing Bitcoin that participants can be anonymous. I was among the people who believed that, and I've always been interested as a reporter, as a cybersecurity reporter in the ways that people seek anonymity online for privacy or to do bad things. That was what interested me about Bitcoin. I thought that this might be an untraceable crime coin for the dark web. And it was very quickly adopted for that purpose on sites like the Silk Road.
Then now looking back, in fact, I had this slow motion epiphany that I only fully realized in 2020 or so, Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable. It was, in fact, an extremely traceable form of money, and it served as a trap for almost a full decade, more than a decade in some sense, for people seeking privacy and especially for criminals who thought that they could get away with all sorts of illicit finance and money laundering and theft and crime and massive drug deals, among other things.
I just absolutely love the book. Think all the incredible detail you captured will be so valuable to readers, just casual readers new to the subject and experts alike. So really just kudos for a triumph of reporting. And we'll try to keep this conversation free of any large spoilers, but obviously, I expect we'll unpack a lot of the themes and a few characters and details from the book. So I just wanted to give a heads up to listeners. There may be a couple of little spoilers here, just as a heads up. But with that said, I have to ask, those $40 that you mentioned that you almost spent on Bitcoin way back in the early days, what if, right?
Yeah, it's a painful memory to think of. So in 2011, I was writing, I think it was the first print magazine story about Bitcoin for Forbes Magazine, I thought, hey, I should just try to buy some Bitcoins to see how these work, and I tried to spend like $40 buying Bitcoins at the time when Bitcoin, the exchange rate was $1 per Bitcoin. I was going to buy 40 Bitcoins with my $40 The only exchange was Mt. Gox, and it was buggy. I tried it, it didn't work, I gave up, And that lack of persistence cost me potentially millions of dollars in retrospect.
I remember distinctly when I was a bit younger and everyone was talking about cryptocurrency, and I had friends who were buying it probably, I mean, not at a good time, right? It was already getting really big. All, folks my age at least, missed that early opportunity. But I think about that too. Like what if? And I remember one of the first things that I learned about cryptocurrency was that in order to mine like Bitcoin, for example, the strain on like the compute power that it takes is awful for the environment. That was like one of the first things that I learned. And sometimes, you know, as a person in the cybersecurity space, I have friends that ask me, like, if I ever got into Bitcoin or if I could go back, if I would get into Bitcoin, and I feel like my answer is always no. Like, it doesn't seem worth it to me, but it's always like that question is always something that I think comes up in this space.
Well, I could have, like, probably bought Bitcoin not at a dollar, but for a few hundreds of dollars, although at that point, it wasn't clear at all that it was going to eventually be worth tens of thousands of dollars. I always held off in part because I guess the journalistic integrity thing, I'm going to keep writing about this, I don't want to have any feelings about trying to promote Bitcoin because I own a lot of it. That was in part why I missed the boat on this, but like I said, it's never really been my interest in Bitcoin as as the investments and the massive appreciation of it that has made it so interesting for most people. It's sort of been a sideshow for me. Like, I've always been interested in Bitcoin as a tool for people seeking privacy for good or ill, and particularly for ill.
I mean, that's like the most interesting part of the Bitcoin economy to me, and the cryptocurrency economy as a whole, been this dark web underworld and ransomware and stolen hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in money flowing around. That I have always done more fascinating than even the get rich quick schemes that I missed in those early days.
I think it's interesting hearing you talk about wanting to... That journalistic perspective, wanting to be sort of hands off because obviously, you know, reading through your part... Parts of your book, at least so far, the the folks that you're writing about were involved in in Bitcoin in so many different ways. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about one of your sources described as the anthropological side of Bitcoin.
Well, Sarah Sarah Meiklejohn is a kind of central character in the book, and she was a a university researcher at the University of California San Diego. And in 2013, just at the same time as, you know, the Silk Road was really taking off, I had interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts, this kind of, like, not... This mysterious creator of the Silk Road. Nobody could figure out who he was. He espoused to me how Bitcoin was untraceable and the perfect, you know, tool for this revolution that he was creating with the Silk Road. He was a, you know, radical libertarian idealist kind of person. She was looking at at the Bitcoin economy, And at first, kind of as you said, looking at it as an anthropologist, trying to figure out, well, what can I actually see if I look at the blockchain? I mean, maybe this is not as untraceable as people think, and I might be able to just kind of observe how people are using Bitcoin by looking at all this data.
The crazy thing about Bitcoin is that all of the transactions are recorded in the blockchain, yet people like me and even Satoshi Nakamoto thought that it had privacy properties because the blockchain only records transactions between addresses, not between people who are identified in any way. But Sarah Meiklejohn started to figure out ways to cluster addresses, to figure out when somebody owned lots of addresses and to tie them all together, and then to even identify when she could figure out who owned which clusters of addresses. And her goal, as you were getting at, at first was just a kind of anthropology, but then she began, I think, to realize, and this is in the paper that she published that year, that if you were in law enforcement, if you could subpoena a cryptocurrency exchange for identifying information, you would be really well placed to actually identify tons of people who thought that they were anonymous.
And she published this paper along with her coauthors at UCSD that was really the first, I would say, first document to explode that myth of Bitcoin's anonymity around traceability. It still didn't get the kind of attention that it ought to have. I mean, it would take years longer for people to truly digest that and and understand, no, this is the opposite of untraceable. But that was a kind of really important historical moment, and a few other characters in the book were really paying attention, including the founders of Chainalysis, which is now the biggest cryptocurrency tracing company in the world worth $8,600,000,000, and people in law enforcement who began to wonder, maybe everybody's wrong about this. Maybe we can trace Bitcoins and surprise a lot of criminals.
I remember back when I was covering some cybersecurity issues as a reporter for E&E News, often framing Bitcoin incorrectly, really, in retrospect. I would often refer to it in stories as this very, if not, I wouldn't say impossible to trace, difficult to trace, falling into that untraceable myth. It's really interesting. But what do you think motivated some of the subjects in your story here? A lot of these people... You mentioned the libertarianism around Dread Pirate Roberts, but then there were others that just kept going, even after they'd already collected millions of dollars in illicit gains. Was it hubris, greed, some combination? What was motivating these characters?
Yeah. It's really interesting. What motivated the Dread Pirate Roberts was... By the way, Blake, I appreciate that I wasn't the only journalist who got this wrong in the early days. Was very... I mean, even after Sarah Meiklejohn's paper, which I covered, and I even had done some tests, some test transactions, I should say, on the Silk Road buying marijuana there at Forbes as an experiment, Absolutely as an experiment.
She traced my transactions, and nonetheless, Sarah showed me that she could trace my transactions. And I still thought, well, if you're a little more careful, if you do the right things, like, if you don't make the mistakes I did, that you can still be untraceable. Like, it's hard to trace at least. And even that, I think, was incorrect, just to address what you were saying. But, yeah, the the motivations of these dark web kingpins, I mean, I think it is interesting to see how different they were. I mean, the dread pirate Roberts, who is really almost just kind of like the character who I used to introduce this world. You know, the book just tells the story of the Silk Road almost as a preamble. He was very idealistic. He was politically motivated. He thought that he could bring in this world of, I would say, anarcho capitalism on the dark web that you know, was very short lived for him at least.
He's sadly now, like, facing a double life sentence in prison. But the people who followed in his footsteps had none of those ideals, I would say. And the one that I'm most interested in and who is a major character in the book is somebody who went by the name Alpha02 on the dark web and was the founder of AlphaBay, which was eventually the biggest dark web drug market in history, 10 times the size of the Silk Road at its peak. He sometimes pretended very briefly to have those libertarian ideals, but then much more clearly was actually just in it for the money, and AlphaBay had none of the rules that the Silk Road had, for instance, about only engaging in victimless crime and had none of the kind of flowery political rhetoric around it.
It was, among other things, also a a haven for cybercriminal hackers who were buying and selling huge amounts of stolen credit card data and hacking tools on AlphaBay, which is actually quite different from the Silk Road. And Alpha02, the founder of of the the site, was himself a kind of notorious carder, like a credit card fraudster before he created AlphaBay, which is very different from Ross Ulbricht to the Dread Pirate Roberts, who was this 29 year old idealistic kid in San Francisco.
We sort of talked about how it took some time for people to actually accept that Bitcoin in particular is not anonymous or not as anonymous as originally thought. And like to me, sometimes I feel like reading about what happened with the Silk Road, it feels like like people were kind of clouded by this like idealism, right? Like There was an optimism of this anonymous currency, made it hard to accept that it might not be. But also, it sort of sounds like maybe folks were just clouded by making money. What do you think about that, I guess?
It's a common cycle of hype and gloom around new technologies, and you saw this with Bitcoin, that everybody wanted to believe in the promise of it and you know... It it was... As it gained value, everybody wanted to try to, like, come up with a reason why it was so special, why everybody should buy into it because there was this sort of profit motive there as well. So I do think people resisted the... You know, a lot of Bitcoiners even resisted talking about the, you know, potential flaws in the privacy properties of Bitcoin. It actually is, I would say, like, a a real drawback to Bitcoin that it's very difficult to hold it even in an anonymous way if you ever want to cash it out or spend it anywhere or or buy it from anyone else.
And that is something that the cryptocurrency community has been trying to solve for years with, you know, tools to work with Bitcoin or upgrades or new cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash, but it remains that the, you know, the the the vast majority of these these really valuable cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are quite traceable, and that's something that has taken the whole economy along that economy a long time to come to grips with.
At some points in the book, it takes some really, really dark turns, and so dark, in fact, that you opt to warn readers upfront about what they're getting into. Can you talk a bit about how you navigated reporting on such disturbing topics? Were there any points where you just wanted to stop an interview or just even go rinse your eyes and ears out with soap?
I think what you're getting at is this major case that followed AlphaBay. I mean, I think it's not a spoiler to say that, like Sure. AlphaBay AlphaBay was eventually, largely through cryptocurrency tracing, busted in this massively elaborate Sting operation that, I don't know, readers can... I'll I'll leave that for the book. But
Thank you. I mean, just to say, like, I have tried to tell this... That story of the the hunt for and takedown of AlphaBay, AlphaBay's administrator, Alpha two, and actually this sort of, like, even larger busts in what's the second biggest dark web market was taken over and run undercover at the same time as AlphaBay was taken down. Anyway, leave it for the book, but that was a story that I had been trying to tell for five years, and I just... It only kind of just reached the point in the last couple of years where the people involved were willing to really tell it in detail.
Good. Yeah. Well, anyway, so the... But that's the AlphaBay case, and then the one that followed is the one that I think you're referring to, which was the Welcome to Video case. And in some ways, you know, despite the size of AlphaBay, this Welcome to Video case was even more impactful because it was... Or this was not a drug market or a hacker black market. This was a a market for child sexual child sexual abuse materials, like videos of child sexual abuse, which was a world that I had never really covered and that I think... You know? I don't know. Just... I, at least, as a reporter, have always sort of almost wanted to avert my gaze from that whole part of the Internet. It's... We all know it exists.
I I think that, like, it's so abhorrent and so disturbing that you don't want to even report on it in some cases. It's just... And people don't want to talk about it. Readers don't wanna read those stories, I I have found. But, for whatever, I couldn't help but tell this story which followed Alphabay in which some of the same investigators, through cryptocurrency tracing alone... I mean, this was a case where, because hundreds and hundreds of these uploaders, downloaders, actual abusers of children in many cases, were paying in Bitcoin, and the administrator was cashing out Bitcoins, they could all be traced. And hundreds of these men, and they were almost all men, of course, were arrested in, like, a dozen countries around the world.
23 children were rescued, and it was all almost exclusively through cryptocurrency tracing that it was possible. So it's truly a landmark case. It's one... Yeah. As you said, it was not fun to report on. I mean, the I am legally prevented, of course, you know, as is anybody who's not in law enforcement from looking even at, like, images of this site, which has now, of course, been taken down. But I was... But I did spend, you know, hours and hours and hours talking to the investigators who did that case and were just deep in that hellish environment of having to watch these videos. And in some cases, they watched them not only to kind of, like, you know, write the criminal indictments, but to look for clues, to try to identify kids, and they did.
I mean, in some cases, they, like, a tiny clue would allow them to find a kid and rescue them or identify one of the perpetrators if they, for instance, had not paid in in any cryptocurrency, they... And they couldn't be traced. In one case, that led to an actual perpetrator who was doing, I should say alleged, I guess, but hands on abuse. Part of what was fascinating about that case and a theme of the book in general is that many of the major... The main characters of this book, I would say, are IRS criminal investigators. They're accountants, essentially. They had never encountered this world any more than I had. They were people who followed financial crimes. So it was a totally new thing for them to be looking at this kind of child abuse, child exploitation case, and they were fully unprepared for it.
Then I tried to tell the story in the book of, like, what that meant for them emotionally, and they are they are, despite being, like, accountants and IRS agents, also law enforcement agents, and it was difficult in some cases to get them to, you know, to get past their kind of, like, tough exterior, but but in... But I... And so I had to just ask again and again about this in a way that was sometimes... I felt almost bad that I was making them relive this trauma, but but I did, you know, like, in the process, I think, get a hint of what it was like to live. I mean, because they truly do, like, throw themselves into these cases in a twenty four seven sort of way to live in a in that environment for months on end. And I think everyone involved was traumatized and and changed.
Well, I think it's super important reporting, and I think you've really... Sometimes, I think even the agents covering this material can be a bit of thankless job. And so I think highlighting their stories and really spending that time with them, certainly being an empathetic interviewer and listening to them and getting their stories on paper, I think certainly serves as a validation of the importance of the work that they're doing, even against these horrific circumstances. But on a lighter note, I will say I was very impressed with your ability to make me cheer for the IRS. That's not something you see every day. I thought the way that you unpacked the pecking order of some of the agencies involved in these cryptocurrency cases was really interesting. You had the IRS sometimes relegated to the kids table, despite their massive contributions. Do you think your book will maybe change the reputations of some of these agencies?
Well, I definitely like to tell underdog stories, so that was part of why I loved the fact that IRS was so central to so much of this. I have to say also that when you're a reporter trying to get people to tell you stories who often don't tell stories, like federal agencies, the IRS was was more willing to talk than, like, the FBI, for instance. The FBI has a very too cool for school mentality about this. It was really hard to get them to even talk about the few parts of these cases that I didn't really need to tell. But the IRS is, I think, a little sick of being relegated, as you said, to the kids table. So I think that they wanted some of the credit they deserved, you know, for for their work.
I didn't really intend this book to be a message sending book so much as, like, a a chronicle of a really crazy period in the history of the Internet where there was this this gap, at least for the last ten years, between the perceptions of people who thought that they were untraceable and the people who were very capably tracing them and the dramatic, the crazy circumstances that that created, the massive cases that resulted. If there is a message in this book, I guess it's a, you know, a kind of public service announcements. This is... That's actually Sarah Meiklejohn's term for it about the privacy problems of cryptocurrency. And in some cases, I truly do think of them as problems.
I mean, it's fun and easy in a way to tell these cops and robbers stories and to root for the investigators chasing people doing bad things. But it's not that simple. You know? I mean, Bitcoin was exciting in part because it seemed like it offered an escape valve from this pervasive financial surveillance that, you know, is everywhere in the traditional banking system and credit cards, and everything can be so easily tracked in our usual money systems, everything in the cashless economy. And Bitcoin seemed to be an antidote to that, like true cash for the Internet, and it really was not. And the fact that that escape valve turned out to be a trap is not an entirely happy story, and, you know, and the fact that, like, this kind of financial surveillance is possible with cryptocurrencies isn't something I feel, like, entirely comfortable about either.
I tried to get into that and, you know, throughout the book in different places and then at the end of the book, but I didn't really want this just to be a a true crime story or a pro law enforcement story.
We we talked a little bit about, like, how Bitcoin is just not as anonymous as as we've previously thought it was. But I think there's one really interesting anonymous person that we haven't talked a whole lot about yet. So I think it's kind of wild that you are one of the last people to get a message routed to the mysterious figure behind all of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. And it doesn't really seem like, from what I've read, that you've gotten a lot of theories about who they might be, like in the book at least. Do you have thoughts on who that might be, or do you even think that their identity matters at this point?
What's interesting, yeah, that you bring that up. I... To be clear, you're referring, I think, to the fact that when I wrote the Forbes Magazine article about Bitcoin in 2011, I asked Gavin Andresen, one of, like, the primary Bitcoin programmers, you know, developers, to pass along a message to Satoshi Yes. For me. And Satoshi No.
You know, he he did have a a public email address at that point, he and was still responding to it. I guess I didn't know what it was. I... You know, I was just so new to the beat that that, you know, I was, like, one of the only reporters, maybe the only reporter that... I don't wanna give myself that much credit. I was, you know, one of very few reporters at the time who was even looking at Bitcoin. But, Satoshi passed a note through Gavin Andresen just saying he declined to comment. But even that, I... I'm not sure there's any other media stories out there that even have a Satoshi decline to comment in them, which is... Which seems so bizarre in retrospect because now he's this legendary, you know, absolute mystery. And, you know, I didn't include this in the book because it's not something I've ever truly been, like, personally interested in, but I have gone down several Satoshi hunting rabbit holes that resulted in stories, good and bad, I should say.
Like, I, at one point, believed that Hal Finney was Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal Finney was the second ever user of Bitcoin. This is a very long and complicated story, but when Newsweek came up with who they thought was the creator of Bitcoin, this guy Dorian Nakamoto, I discovered that Hal Finney, the second ever user of Bitcoin, lived just down the street from where Dorian Nakamoto lived for many years, and that seemed to me to be a sign that Hal Finney had at least helped to create Bitcoin. Maybe he'd even used Dorian Nakamoto, as his fake name, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, that's his middle name, as a kind of way to disguise himself. And a lot of people believed that Hal, was Satoshi. I eventually visited Hal, at his home, and at the time, he was very sadly dying.
He was paralyzed with ALS. These were, like, the last months of his life, really. He was unable to even communicate with me except through, like, a kind of eye movement tracking typing system and, like, raising his eyebrows. He denied being Satoshi, and he showed me some evidence that he was not, and I believe him. I I came to the conclusion before publishing any stories. It was... I I published a story that was about, Hal, who was a remarkable, really wonderful person. He had had his hands in many incredible crypto... Actual encryption and cryptocurrency developments, but I don't think he was Satoshi.
One thing that I think you do really well in the book is talking about some of these, even the technical aspects of how a Zcash works, how it melds all of these different transactions into one mix up situation and enables more anonymity than Bitcoin and tries to go after some of these really complex mechanisms that maybe evaded some of the early adopters of cryptocurrencies. It's really complex stuff. There's a lot to unpack. It can be hard to follow for the technically uninitiated. And I think your book does a really great job of getting people to understand enough to really feel compelled by the story and really engage with it directly. Part of how I think you do that... You have so many colorful characters that you bring to life, whether it's Bitcoin Jesus or Octopus Guy that really helped whisk the story right along.
I would say that my favorite character is, like, is the main character of the story. I mean, there's a reason why I chose to focus so much of the story on Tigran, Tigran Gambaryan, this IRS criminal investigator. You know, it is... He is just like a wonderful mix of... He is a nerd. He's an accountant. He's a forensic accountant. He, like, spent years working at the IRS auditing people, but he's also this Armenian immigrant who has lived in in post Soviet Moscow for much of his childhood and witnessed, like... He had a very difficult childhood. He's, like, a very tough sort of post Soviet guy in many ways, even if that's not an unfair caricature. He has this chip on his shoulder. He's tired of the lack of respect that IRS gets.
He is a true gun toting federal agent who who has ambitions of, like, taking down bad guys and knocking down doors and, like, hauling people to prison, and and he has this, like, very clear sense of right and wrong. He's just a, like, a, you know, a really unplaceable character in that way, and and, yeah, it was just a wonderful gift to the story that he is also, he is, I guess, Bitcoin Jesus. He is referred to as, as that in some in some cases because he was kind of the Bitcoin whisperer within so much of law enforcement. He was at the center of so many of these cases. So, you know, he is the one who who, with Chainalysis, located the AlphaBay server. He is the one who traced Bitcoins for the very first time to prove someone's guilt in the beginning of the book, you know, and he is also involved in the Welcome to Video case and so many others.
He eventually seizes... I don't wanna spoil too many things, but he he he at one point, like, broke the record for seizing more, not just Bitcoin, but any kind of currency in Department of Justice history. So, you know, I do feel very grateful to Tigran that he told me these stories and and that he's such a a weird and unusual figure.
So to wrap things up, we have a question for you that we ask of all of our interviewees. What is something that we wouldn't know about you just by looking at your LinkedIn profile or your other online social media presence?
I guess one thing that I did not include on my LinkedIn resume is that I briefly had a career, you could... I don't know, more like a job as a Chinese language children's music recording artist, and I I like yeah. I lived in China for a while. I spoke Chinese, and then and then I I was, like, somewhat desperate for work and and, like, recorded some some Chinese language children's music that's maybe out there somewhere.
I've been a reporter covering cybersecurity for fifteen years, so before 2005, does... Doesn't it feel like things are not in the permanent record in the same way, which is really a good thing for me, as you can tell.
Yeah. The Internet archive is helpful, but only goes so far ultimately for some of these things. But no, that is definitely a fun fact and one that I'm sure our listeners will appreciate learning about you. And thank you again for joining us. Really fascinating book. Definitely recommend everybody give it a read. It's really a crowning achievement of reporting and an excellent primer on all these super important issues that are really only sticking with us for the long term. Bitcoin's here to stay.
Thank you for talking about it, and thanks for those... Yeah, that's that's very kind of you. I mean, especially coming from you, Blake. I've I've followed your reporting for years, and you've also done some amazing work. Let me... Maybe I shouldn't say this because, Bella, I'm not sure if you're a reporter too, and I don't wanna were a reporter No, say
You probably just do, like, the actual impressive stuff that you then do not publish, like me and Blake who are just, you know, showing off all the time.
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