Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 [VIDEO] - One FATAL Mistake Destroyed The Dark Web Overlords | Andy Greenberg • #127

Episode Date: November 26, 2022

Buy “Tracers In The Dark” (Andy’s New Book): https://amzn.to/3AMaNWQ (***TIMESTAMPS & Book Links in description below) ~ Andy Greenberg is an award-winning journalist, author, and hacking expert. Currently, Andy is a senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, and information freedom. Throughout his career at Wired (and Forbes before that), Greenberg has been the go-to reporter on major international news stories including: Julian Assange & Wikileaks, Ross Ulbricht & Silk Road, Government-Sponsored hacking in Russia, China, & North Korea –– and the underworld of cryptocurrency. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Cypherpunks; Early Silk Road; Bitcoin Dark Web Integration 14:48 - Ross Ulbricht: The Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) 20:48 - The alleged hits Ross is suspected of ordering 31:17 - The Curtis Green Hit; The sketchy Baltimore DEA taskforce 37:00 - Andy attended Ross’ trial in NYC; BTC is traceable 50:56 - How the feds caught Ross 1:00:26 - The Feds catch rogue agent via Bitcoin trace; How BTC traceability was invented 1:18:19 - The Mt Gox debacle; Chainalysis 1:35:11 - Govs want crypto dead; Ways to prevent traceability 1:48:38 - John Boseak & early carders; Russia / Ukraine have brilliant hackers 1:56:46 - AlphaBay Founder: Alexandre Cazes (aka Alpha02) 2:05:15 - First breakthrough in AlphaBay case; AlphaBay size at it speak 2:17:16 - Cazes high life in Bangkok, Thailand 2:27:12 - The task force sting on Cazes in Bangkok 2:36:08 - Cazes’ mysterious death in jail 2:43:15 - Hansa & the rest of the AlphaBay takedown post-Cazes 2:50:35 - The Child Crimes Dark Web Gov Cases; Crypto traceability good? 2:55:46 - Where does digital currency go from here? Intro Credits: “Triple Frontier” (2019) “The A-Team” (2010) “Convict” (2014) “Nobody” (2021) “Dark Web: Cicada 3301” (2021) ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He turns around, goes into the master bedroom, and finds that Kaza's laptop is there and still open and alive, logged into AlphaBay. Kaza's arrested. He's taken to Thai jail, essentially. He agrees to extradition, and then a week after his arrest, he's found dead in his jail cell. Alleged suicide. Right, yeah. So... I honestly can't... can't relate to that yet. Yeah, well, enjoy not relating to that while you can, is what I would say. I will.

I will. I'm not in a hurry yet. But listen, we got a lot to talk about. You have been busy working away on your latest book that is coming out on November 15th. So it will – we're recording right before then. This will have come out when the episode's on. So link is in the description check it out it's called tracers in the dark fantastic book thank you but we had gotten to touch on it last time just like mentioned you were working on it but you wanted to save some of the conversation for

when it was coming out and i got to tell you i think that was a really good idea because i was under the impression a lot of it was going to come back to just the Silk Road, but you went so far beyond that. Definitely. I mean, the Silk Road was the beginning of the story, but truly, it is a decade long story that starts with the Silk Road and ends, you know, in a place that is, you know, with about dark web sites that are 10 times the size of the Silk Road, among other things. Yeah. Yeah. And for people out there who just aren't familiar Can you briefly just explain what the Silk Road was and then we'll we'll get into it for sure. But yeah for sure. I mean the The Silk Road and tell me if we should break down this down even further. The Silk Road was a dark web drug website

Where a dark web drug markets where you could essentially log on with this anonymity software called Tor, the Tor browser. Silk Road itself ran as a website that used Tor to make it impossible for anybody to figure out where it was hosted and who ran it. And it was essentially like this dark web eBay for all sorts of contraband, but mainly drugs it was essentially like a an online bizarre uh like a market for every drug imaginable uh that grew into by 2013 a massive um operation where like hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs were were being transacted all the time yeah and when you think about it it was part a huge part of the story was the fact that they you had to use bitcoin to do the actual transactions and this was the earliest days of cryptocurrency period but bitcoin as well because 2011 bitcoin came out in 2009 so it was much cheaper and far less known and this

website in a lot of ways people say legitimized it Totally, I mean should I talk about like how I like started absolutely. Let's get to the start of it. Yeah, I First well, I guess around this this time you're referencing like 2010 2011 I was working on a book that we talked about last time That was really like partially at least about the cypherpunk movement this this social movement very interesting group of mostly dudes i should say um who i was going to say guys and but it is mostly men who believed that they could use encryption uh and this started i'm really talking about like a group that began in the 1990s they believed that

they could use encryption technologies like secrecy tools like the ability to encrypt information so that even the government couldn't crack it to take power away from like federal governments and corporations and give it to individuals so mostly like radical libertarian types exactly yeah and definitely this group like gave rise to what we now use as like vpns, which I just talked about, and also Wikileaks. And the whole idea of granting anonymity but actually guaranteeing it for journalistic sources and leakers using these tools that Julian Assange came up with. He was a cypherpunk, too. That came out of the cypherpunk movement and so as i was like kind of getting like really obsessed with this group for a different book that i was writing um i i came upon what seemed to be this new cypherpunk invention it was described to me that way um

uh bitcoin the this guy gavin andreessen who was one of the first bitcoin developers programmers uh gave this kind of ted style talk that i watched on youtube at the time um where he describes bitcoin as basically like cypherpunk money like a a kind of digital cash for the internet uh that among other things like could be sent anonymously to anyone in the world um that it's you know appeared to be this kind of cypherpunk, holy grail thing that they've been this movement I've been trying to achieve for a long time without success, which is like, essentially anonymous crypto money. I mean, the word cryptocurrency was like not in common use then actually. So when I wrote the first piece, I actually interviewed Gavin Andreessen, I tracked

him down, I wrote this piece for Forbes magazine about Bitcoin, which I when I wrote the first piece I actually interviewed Gavin Andreessen and I tracked him down I wrote this piece for Forbes magazine about Bitcoin Which I think was like the first print magazine piece about Bitcoin like 2011 ish in April of 2011. Okay, and I Actually headlined that piece cryptocurrency like thinking I'd come up with this clever like nobody was using that phrase back then and I'll and Gavin had described bitcoin to me as untraceable and i believed it was and and even satoshi nakamoto this mysterious creator of bitcoin nobody of course still knows who he or she or they are yeah um could be multiple people

had described had themselves or himself or whatever uh described bitcoin in this email introducing it to a cryptography mailing list and saying like among its features that participants can be anonymous so it really did seem like even the creator of bitcoin thought this was going to be like a kind of anonymous cash like you could for for the digital world like you could put uh you know unmarked bills in a briefcase and like, send it across the world to anybody without revealing your identity at all, you know, without any identifying information associated with it whatsoever. And that seemed to me to be like, I mean, I unfortunately was not interested in investing in Bitcoin at the time. In April of 2011, a Bitcoin was worth a dollar. And I thought like, oh, you know,

as I write this magazine piece, maybe I should just buy like $40 worth of Bitcoins, like 40 Bitcoins. And unfortunately, like I tried this on the... Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup.

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Neutral. Refreshingly simple. The only existing cryptocurrency exchange at the time, Mtx which was very buggy we'll talk about that for sure and uh and it didn't work i couldn't get the transaction to go through and i gave up which was like a uh i don't like to think too much about how much that uh mistake cost me but i you know but yikes what i'm trying to yeah it was a multi-million dollar uh little i got sick reading that for you yeah i was like oh yeah but then you know i i wasn't interested in like this notion of bitcoin as a lot of people see it today as like kind of digital gold like a way to store your money as an investment i was interested and i think a lot of people were back then in in the

notion that bitcoin was kind of like this almost subversive sort of digital cash that like could be spent without a trace uh just like cash can be in in a drug deal or whatever and sure enough like as you were saying i mean just months, the Silk Road kind of appeared online. I think it actually may have launched in 2010, but nobody really was aware of it until 2011. And I, you know, I like came upon this, this like dark web markets that seemed to be offering like all sorts of illegal drugs for sale in bitcoin and it kind of confirmed this idea to me that like yeah bitcoin truly is a um crypto cash for the internet and it it evades any attempt at regulation or tracing or law enforcement uh that's certainly like how the creator of the dark of this silk road saw it this another mysterious, at the time,

figure who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. To be fair, I should say that when I first saw the Silk Road online, I was like, this can't be real. This must be a scam. There's heroin listed for sale here.

This is either I don't know, like just some sort of uh pipe dream like this is not going to really work or uh it's it's truly a scam like somebody's trying to steal people's bitcoins and what you know there have been a million schemes like that still are yeah yeah and it was only like a few months later after that, that Adrian Chen at Gawker wrote his, wrote the real, like first real piece about the Silk Road. And he had found people who had done, who had bought like asset off the Silk Road and it worked perfectly well. And, and kind of, I couldn't believe that I'd missed, like, you know, being so obsessed with the

cypherpunks, I'd like missed an even bigger story than Bitcoin, it seemed at the time, like an actual black market on the dark web, transacting in cryptocurrency and selling every drug imaginable. And it was real. I mean, that was, yeah, another regret. But you tested it out, though. Well, sure. yeah another regret but you tested it out though well sure I mean certainly like at that point at that point I

I was like fully like well I was in fact trying to figure out like how can I get the next big story about the Silk Road as it grew into like a massive phenomenon and as you know that when the Gawker piece came out

that Adrian wrote Chuck Schumer and I forget massive phenomenon and as you know that when the gawker piece came out that adrian wrote um chuck schumer and i forget joe mansion i think like held a press conference even to say like this is uh you know we condemn this uh horrible website that you know is represents like a new chapter in the war on drugs and is powered by untraceable cryptocurrency. It was a massive controversy immediately, and they called on the DEA to shut this site down. Yeah, and that was like – that was towards the beginning. But what – obviously Bitcoin was worth a lot less, but in the first year there, they were already doing tens of millions of dollars of revenue on that, no? Absolutely. I mean, the thing about like the exchange rate of Bitcoin goes up, goes down, but the actual sort of economy of buying and selling things in Bitcoins, like the drugs didn't change in value. So like anybody who was buying heroin on the Silk Road

or acid or whatever in 2011, that turned out to be very expensive acid for them. Because if you spent like whatever, when Bitcoin was worth a dollar and you were buying whatever 50 bucks worth of weed or something, that turned out to be like millions of dollars in future money but you know nobody could have known that at the time and um and it really was working and absolutely not immediately but very soon like that silk road was doing hundreds of

thousands of dollars worth of transactions a day now how would it work because you have you have a dark web market so it's not like you have a government backstop regulator here this is all obviously completely under the table they have to access it on tor as you said and use bitcoin to transact but if i went on there as you did and and it might be helpful to talk about like your experience when you did buy some stuff on behalf of forbes and everything but certainly like only on behalf of forbes only on behalf of just as an experiment did not use any of the drugs let's be clear about that but still when you would make the purchase my understanding is that the money wouldn't go straight away to the seller they'd put it in like an escrow thing so that the the transaction would have to be confirmed on your

end like you had to receive it and then tell the site like oh i got it now they can give the money over yeah i mean the the silk road was really a brilliant invention i mean people like look back on it and see flaws in it but it was but um the dread pirate roberts who ran this thing really did come up with some serious innovations just there were there were almost like um like financial innovation even more than like technological. So yeah, there was an escrow where when you buy drugs, your money is put into escrow and then it's only released once you receive the drugs in the mail. Something that nobody really would have, I would have never thought that that was possible

to ship drugs in the mail in these quantities and that it would not all be caught, but it worked. And the dealers, the vendors, who were third parties, like the drug pirate Roberts is sitting in the middle as this administrator of the market. He's the market maker. But then the buyers and sellers are acting independently. And these dealers started to really come up

with clever ways to hide the drugs in shipping it. And there was an entire user forum where people discussed like the best ways to like uh you know um obfuscate the drugs that you were sending in the mail yeah there were a lot of good ways to do that i remember college that was some wild shit people would do yeah and and um you know like i mean the clever things like um you're sending like psychedelic mushrooms in the mail and you put it inside of a

fake beef stroganoff package that looks like the dried mushrooms on the side of the whatever I mean there were just an endless number of these things but then also just like triple sealing and mylar and whatever but that all worked incredibly well but then yeah so then once you receive the drugs in the mail you confirm that you've incredibly well but but then yeah so then uh once you receive the

drugs in the mail you confirm that you've got it that only then is the money in the escrow released to the seller so they can't scam you then there's like ratings and reviews which in the which in the drug world is actually like really important you can you know the the quality of these drugs can be assessed in a way that was never possible with you know just like buying random drugs from some dude in the bathroom of a club or something you know um it was a real it was a real innovation um and not like you know i would never claim that it uh it's it was absolutely a criminal operation but it but it was also um it's really important to to get this across that like the dread pirate roberts was a political figure yes he saw the silk road as a

a political experiment first at least like that was his first conception of it i do believe that like he he was this radical libertarian he wanted with the silk Road to, to just show that it was going to be possible in this new era of this kind of cyberpunk utopia that he foresaw, to just like buy and sell things without any participation from the government, no taxation, no restrictions, anybody can buy and sell anything and put into their bodies, whatever they choose to, you know, so he really, I think, wanted to take the violence out of the drug trade, among other things. Yeah, he was very, he thought the war on drugs was a total disaster, and that this was the one stop shop to fix it. And I think when you look through the catalogs now of all his online correspondence behind the names it's it's pretty clear that

to me and we're talking we're talking about dpr who ended up being ross ulbrich we'll talk about how that went down and everything but ross was a guy who i think from behind the keyboard started to feel the power of the movement itself and let that affect his actions because he wasn't a guy this was not a guy out there buying lamborghinis or anything like that he lived a very simple life he wasn't he wasn't this like just doing it for his own fame type guy but the movement the political ideology of radical libertarianism in this case really overtook him and drove an incredible innovation but also led him to slip up and get caught. I would say – I mean I feel bad saying this because just to set the context here, Ross Ulbricht is like serving life in prison now.

No parole. Without parole, two life sentences I think. And I – he is in a a vulnerable position he can't truly like speak for himself but i do think it's so i feel bad like saying um critical things about him but just you have to tell this story properly i think that he was eventually we'll get to this i guess kind of corrupted in his ideals and i think eventually he was not just doing stuff out of um libertarian and idealistic motivation he was he had become uh sort of enamored of the power and the millions of dollars flowing like through

you know around his invention and did some you know nasty things to try to protect that but but it definitely there's no question that it started from a a place of of idealism and he uh had rules for the silk road that you could only buy and sell things that he considered to be victimless crimes you know there was no child pornography child what we now call like child sexual abuse materials there were there was no murder for hire although that's a story that the media has told endlessly. The Silk Road did not have assassination services for sale. There were, at some points, weapons for sale. The Dread Pirate Roberts believed, I think, that guns

can be used for self-defense, but there were limits in that he disallowed any weapon that could be used for self-defense and but there were limits in that he he like disallowed any weapon that could be used on like large groups of people for instance like he didn't i think once obviously to become like a a hub for terrorism um and eventually he shut down even the gun sales because it wasn't really working very well i think it's a lot harder to send a gun through the mail yeah i could imagine i feel like that one they can find through metal metal detectors pretty easy right but but there were you know this this notion of like victimless crime um was real on the silk road there were hacking tools that were sold eventually um but the rules were

that those are not supposed to be sold and it i the eventually the government pointed to those um as examples of like you know exceptions to this victimless crime rule. And I don't really know how that happened. I think that in part, the site just grew so big that – or I don't know. I mean, even that is like selling hacking tools was a very small part of this Rhodes business. And for a very long time, like even the drug sales, it's important to point out most of it was not like heroin. Right. It was not cocaine even.

It was like mushrooms, acid. A lot of ecstasy. Yeah. Ecstasy was like a major product on there, in part because the quality of it could be guaranteed, which has always like, you know, i think been a challenge with mdma so um there was like a when when you looked at the silk road in 2011 2012 it really did seem like a super interesting and ethically complicated place you know like um not just a not a drug cartel or a criminal operation you know in a simple way like that definitely violating all international law for sure but and people bought

heroin and died from yes silk road it there's no doubt that it it expanded the drug trade probably in ways that like um there were stories of people who had gone clean. But then. And then moved someplace where like drugs were not very accessible. But then when they saw the Silk Road. They couldn't resist the temptation. Yeah. And you know.

Like. Drugs are morally complicated. Yes. But. But. But I just always want to like. Tell the story of the Silk Road in this way that doesn't just make it sound like Ross Ulbricht, like the Dread Pirate Roberts was Scarface or something. Yeah, so my stance on this – and you and I have talked about this before a little bit off air, and I've talked about it on some other podcasts back in the day.

Earlier on when we were doing these, i think there were two podcasts in particular where it got covered a bunch but you know when people were talking about like the pardon with ross because his sentence was insane what he was given his sentence crime did not fit the sentence at all but when people are talking about pardon i've always backed off that and said listen i don't think the guy's necessarily a bad guy and i think there's a lot of amazing innovation he had but you can't violate every international law on drugs and some other things and not be punished for that but i i've always therefore looked at like commutation as as a route with with his sentence which we'll see what happens there but you know i don't think that – I think the world can get really complicated, and you can see people innovate ahead of where governments are and perhaps then – not perhaps.

In this case, 100% inject their political ideology into it in a way that's radical. Let's call it what it is. But I also think that the way that they painted him out to be was far beyond the scope of what he was for one thing i feel pretty confident based on the evidence that he was in over his head pretty quickly and that it's very very to me i i fully believe but i think from an evidence perspective it is is very easy to make the case at least i'll say that there were multiple dread pirate roberts multiple people using that account and so there's no doubt that some of the correspondence that happened on that account from behind the keyboard online was questionable to say the least and morally awful in in some cases as it got to with

calling hits on people and things like that but i I think things do change when you're doing things online. It doesn't make anything right. But to me, just looking at it from a humanity perspective, I mean we see people on Twitter, right? People on Twitter will say things that you can meet these people in person and then they're like kind of nice or like they're not like that or they never say it like that and it's just this thing where you feel real confident behind a keyboard being able to say do this or i think this or i think that and there's definitely a part of me that thinks a lot of that happened with with ross and even some of the other guys who were operating behind that keyboard there to where if some of the other guys were were putting hits on people or whatever and some some people have accused Ross of that.

He's denied that a lot, and the government did not bring those charges at trial. But if that were the case, I don't view it as the same capability of someone who's sitting here in a room and says, go hit that guy. You know what I mean? There's more of an emotional disconnection, and that's also their fault for setting up a system to where that that is possible to happen yeah well well let's see like i uh i don't know where to begin with this like there's yeah like i said i think ross was very idealistic but he was just like um and you know to your point that he was ahead of his time, I think he, it's,

you know, so many kinds of drugs have been legalized or are about to be legalized that were for sale on the Silk Road. But it's also worth pointing out that Ross wasn't for drug legalization. He didn't want to be, you know,

he didn't want drugs to be legalized and taxed. Or the Dread Pirate Roberts didn't anyway. I should say, like, can I just, if I could just tell the story yeah please please i i got really found yourself into the middle of it right i mean i i got really obsessed with the dread pirate roberts even beyond the silk road his creation i wanted to like um do a piece on this person the dread pirate roberts who was this political figure saw himself as like leading a revolution in the way he was talking to his community on the silk road which had its own user

forums he had a dread pirate roberts book club where he was like you know recommending like anarcho-capitalist like yeah philosophy stuff i mean so i i did like bug him for about eight months until he agreed to an interview and that's where he laid out a lot of this political ideology which I was this that was in I talked to him on July 4th of 2013 yeah for like I don't know a long time it was all like done over the Silk Roads tour protected messaging system he like all text he made me like a um like a temporary drug dealer on the site essentially just to be able to have an account to like um message

with him how long did it take you to convince him to do that because you're doing it all via text obviously it's not like you're seeing who he is but how long did that take it took eight months like i um i started asking in 2012 i think and then uh he you know he didn't i think want that kind of um visibility or um heat and then i think what was your pitch to him i'm curious because you find your way to get like in you can see it in your books too with some of the people you get access to but then look at your career of some of some of the publicity between ross and before that julian assange before anyone who knew knew who julian assange was like you find your way into these situations and people give you the trust to be like yeah yeah come in andy well i do think that part of it is that

ross's ego was are the dread pirate roberts whatever his ego was growing over time as the silk road became bigger and bigger and And as law enforcement continued to chase them totally in vain. Like, I think that Ross's hubris, as it became like one and two and then two and a half years, ultimately, that he was evading law enforcement successfully. He thought that he was untouchable.

And what he was doing was so remarkable that I think he started to want attention. But I did, this is not actually even in the book, but I did do a thing with him eventually where I was like, okay, my editors say now that we're going to do this piece one way or another. If it's not going to be about you, I'm going to do it about your competitor.

Because at that point, there were these sort of copycat dark web markets and they were part of the story too. I wasn't like lying to him but i think at that point he was like well i can't abide by um one of these other dark web uh administrators getting the credit instead of me so that's when he actually agreed to do it and i i don't know that feels a little maybe that's manipulative but it was true also that like at some point the this other side atlantis was uh had popped up was like um gaining

some of his market share a little bit at least and the administrators of that site had like their own chief marketing officer stuff so they were like ready to talk anytime and uh if he didn't you know if he wasn't going to talk somebody else was going to so how long did you talk with him on there well i talked with him like i said for months off the record and then right but then he spends like uh you know five hours going back and forth but that's like in part because tor is really slow and uh and also because i think in retrospect that he probably was talking to me while conferring with other people who helped him run the site uh and including possibly i you know i think we differ in our opinions of like to what degree there were

multiple dread pirate roberts but there was definitely this kind of second in command guy yeah what was his name he was by variety jones yes that's it right i think his real name turned out to be roger clark i believe i've never i haven't covered his case so closely but he was like he was in thailand or something yeah yeah um thailand comes up again later but but he um he i think was not only kind of advising ross but also like pushing him to become more of like a hardcore criminal. I've seen ultimately the chats between them, the IMs. I don't think that they knew each other's real identities, by the way. Like so many people on the dark web, they work together only through text,

through tour, never actually met in person. Didn't Ross know the identity? I could be remembering this wrong from Nick Bilton's book, I feel like Ross there was a thing where he made anyone who was gonna join on send them his copy their driver's license or you know it's a really interesting question like he definitely did that from for the most of the people who worked for him but now that I think about it I don't I don't think he did that for Roger Clark might be true for a variety Jones I can't remember it was this incredible thing that like he made the people who worked for him send them uh his identifying information and he kept it on his encrypted laptop you know thinking um this was

like he had he had full disc encryption on his laptop so he thought if i just closed the lid law enforcement will never be able to access this that's the problem and like that uh but just the fact that it took so long to catch variety jones um the second command guy whereas the other people on the site were quite easily identified because their ids were on his laptop but we'll get to like how that laptop was accessed but like um i think that probably he was variety jones was just more careful. And he also had like a sort of power over Ross. I mean, you could see in their conversations when they eventually came out in illegal documents that like he was really influencing Ross in a kind of insidious way. And I've read the conversation where Ross thinks that he's got an employee who has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins from him and he doesn't know what to do

and uh Variety Jones is like little his you know second in command guy um Lothario kind of figure is like I think this guy needs to needs to get killed that was curtis green right that's right and the employee and ross you can see him like hesitating not wanting to do this i mean the whole notion of the silk road is that it's going to be a a non-violent that actually reduces violence in the drug trade but he like you can see him be talked into it by a variety Jones and I believe I know I think you and I like maybe disagree about this I do believe that that that Ross himself who I believe was at the very least most of the time he was the Dread Pirate Roberts that he was persuaded to try to have people killed

now I'm not gonna put the picture of Curtis Green in the corner because I don't want to get the video demonetized. But people can Google that Silk Road, Curtis Green, fake murder. There's a picture that is – it will look like a dead body, but he was very much alive. It was – there were federal agents who staged the image itself. I forget what – they used like soup packets or something exactly they use like uh Campbell's soup like yes make it look like he had sort of vomited like during this torture session exactly I mean it's all really um Grizzly stuff but all fake like all the DEA this is like a bizarre story that you know this I I don't tell this story in incredible detail in the book. This book is

just telling the Silk Road story as a preamble to what was to come. But like it is an amazing story of like they essentially identified Curtis Green, set him up to be this victim

of a fake murder. The task force did. And this is, by the way, like the task force did and this is by the way like one task force in baltimore that was going after the dread pirate roberts are you talking about just to be clear are you talking about just the dea part of it right now with baltimore it was just baltimore it was actually like multiple agencies because i was going to say it was homeland security dea secret service they were all involved i'm sure about FBI or IRS in that in in that in Baltimore right okay that's what I'm asking there was another team simultaneously tracking DPR chasing Ulbricht you know eventually identifying him based out of New York that was Chris Tarbell

that's Chris yeah that's the FBI uh IRS yeah IRS criminal investigations and uh they had their own homeland security guy uh so it's a very complicated but there were actually two competing teams go out going after him was that the i'm gonna up his name but van dergaman or something was he the new york one and then there was other other homeland security people working with baltimore well that's true yeah i mean jared duryegan is the guy's name and he was he was based out of chicago just to complicate things further but he was working with the new york team right and they were let's like just to simplify it like they were the the more by the book uh successful and i would say like kind of like not to be too insulting to like

all the people involved in baltimore but the more top tier like yeah southern district of new york where that case was prosecuted out of where it was led is always like the one that's doing the big internet cases i want to bookmark that though because i do want to come back to how they access frosty that's interesting but well the server certainly yeah yeah i don't want to get you off curtis green though there's so much here there's this baltimore team that was doing much i don't know weirder stuff including faking this murder um and but i don't think like so there was never a real murder um that ross like actually paid for or um but i do you know i do actually believe that he thought that he had had someone murdered I It's it's it's a perfectly reasonable opinion to have and I and we've taught you and I have talked about this before like I said

off-air and so I respect that because also as People have already heard you were at the middle of this thing while it was going down You were then a main feature in the documentary deep web in 2015 which discussed a lot of this case right when it was finishing up trial. But with Curtis Green, a couple things that I would throw out there just as like maybe, but I don't know. First of all, I have always wondered, and I don't even know how technologically possible this is, but you never know with government organizations and what they have access to. I have always wondered if there was any correspondence or data edited, who today is – he made a deal to do that whole thing. I don't even think did time or if he did a very short time, but he's a regular citizen doing his thing now. He goes around with Ross Ulbrich's mother Lynn and does podcasts and openly discusses how – He fully agrees with you.

He says there were multiple Dread Pirates. I don't know what to make of that i can't say yeah maybe you know we have to like the the chat logs like some of them were from this the silk road server some of them were for ross l brick's laptop um you know could those have been altered i don't know i say that yeah it's i and it seems unlikely but possible i guess um the but the thing is and this is like what my book is about is that at ross albrecht's trial they not only showed that they could trace the bitcoins from the Silk Road server to Ross Albrecht's laptop but they showed money coming out of Ross Albrecht's laptop it that was exactly the amounts and the timing for the hits that he was commissioning and this is not the not the Curtis Green murder for hire yeah there were like five or something.

Another collection of them that followed, sort of like going after a scammer who had scammed money from the Silk Road and his associates. And in that case, you can see it on the blockchain. And this is what my book is about. This is not like – this is an interesting case because it's almost like like uh i i after ross ulbricht was busted and we haven't even talked about how that happened yeah we'll get to that in a minute i attended every minute of his trial in new york and um i was as shocked as anybody when their one day of this trial they they use bitcoin tracing as part of the evidence against him i mean um it had started started to become clear at that point that bitcoin was not the untraceable digital cash anonymous like um untraceable money that i that i thought it was that perhaps even people uh like the cypher

punks and even satoshi nakamoto thought it was but this was the first time it ever was used in a courtroom and uh they could they could show on the blockchain and i have looked at this myself i mean the blockchain the amazing thing about it is that it's a public record of every bitcoin transaction if you know whose addresses are whose you can look that up yourself and i i did this and i you know matching it with the uh what the prosecution has listed as ross ulbrich's bitcoin address is taken from his laptop you can see yourself the transactions where he's he was paying what he thought was a hitman so he actually thought it was like a hell's angels um gang member who was gonna do these murders for him how long was his trial thought it was like a hell's angels um gang member who was gonna do these murders for him how long was his trial approximately it was very short i mean um well i don't know i haven't covered that many trials like gavel to gavel as they say but it was i think uh three

weeks maybe okay so it wasn't like crazy long but no one thing that has always sat wrong with me, because again, you would think too, the basis of your book right here, which is that they can trace Bitcoin. We're going to talk a lot about that with these other cases as charges against Ross and catching him – and maybe we should talk about finally how that happened in a second. But they – in the media, they tried them by media. It was going to be a federal courtroom, so no cameras in there. They knew that. They said, oh, we're going to charge them with six hits and all this stuff and running this whole site and whatever. And then they get to the trial. And before the trial, they drop all the hits charges. They did not charge him with that. Yet they still discussed it in the courtroom.

And they quote unquote provided the smoking gun evidence that he exchanged the proper Bitcoin to have ordered these hits. So why did they not charge him with the hits? That's what makes me go there's a rat there well I don't really I don't know why they didn't charge him I I can say that they did charge him with murder for hire in another case in Maryland because of that Baltimore group that was doing that separately they actually had a murder charge against him which they that case was then

dropped once he was given a life sentence so um the question is like why did this the southern district of new york in the case that actually went to trial not include murder for hire and i what i've actually been told years later is there was like a jurisdictional issue but you know i don't know why never heard of that for Southern District in New York they could have I'm sure made made a case somehow to include the yeah it's crazy I think that they would have to have shown that like the purported victims or the purported perpetrator was in the Southern District of New York and they did have to do stuff like buy drugs undercover for in the southern district of new york to make that a new york case um that you know there are like always

these these jurisdictional things that you know are like kind of legal sausage making for prosecutors yes um but you know is that why i don't know it's it's strange and i think truly a problem that the jury in that room and i and every everybody else you know hears the whole story of of ross's you know attempted murders for hire and that's not actually the those are not the charges against him um and then he is sentenced in part based on that are you even but this is where i'm really not a lawyer are you allowed to do that if you don't charge someone with something are you allowed to rep to present evidence that might be a really dumb question but i would say the other thing i'm sorry they get like really legalistic

the other thing is that there was a charge against ross called continuing criminal enterprise and that's people call that the kingpin statute and the what that like technically means is like uh that you have like at least five people working for you in your criminal enterprise. And he certainly did. Yes, absolutely. I think his defense probably could have gone after that and said, prove that. Prove that there were five people working for him because I'm not sure that they could have proved that. But who knows?

By the way i always thought this was you know he needed to get eight ten years in prison and the other guys the other guys in the case all got like three to six i mean i always thought to be clear that like yeah you have to go to prison for this this isn't like oh get probation or help it it's like yeah there's certainly retribution that's needed it's just the matter of he eventually was sentenced to double life without parole in supermax that's absolutely but this charge you know i i've just i've talked on and off the record to the silk road prosecutors in the years since and you talked to preet no he these are like the people like preet is like the boss doesn't try it he's the boss exactly makes the shots um the thing is that the this. Preet doesn't try it. He's the boss. Exactly. Makes the shots. The thing is that this continuing criminal enterprise, this Kingpin statute, as it's known colloquially, does sort of like – the prosecutors say that the violence that he was accused of sort of can be included in that in the sentencing under this Kingpin statute.

I don't really – I'm not a a lawyer i don't know how that works i did i was there when he was convicted i was there at his sentencing and i listened to this to judge the judge in that case um lay out her argument for his sentence before she said what it was going to be. And it was extremely rational. It seemed like so well-constructed and like, I mean, she seems like a really intelligent, obviously, person and I was very impressed. And I was like, okay, these are really good points. Is Judge Forrest, is that Forrester?

I hesitate to say her name because it's almost like, you know, I don't want to like call for retribution against her she's not a judge anymore um it's no it's not retreat she just did her sure her name is catherine forest right um but then and she made this argument that i thought was was very smart um that like uh yes you say you took violence out of the drug trade but actually you took it only out of one part of the drug trade. The wholesalers essentially, who were the suppliers of drugs, you know, the people in Afghanistan or Mexico or whatever, who then provide drugs to the people who sold on the

Silk Road, that is physical and was the violence there exists as always those are probably the most violence that most the most violence happens at the source yes absolutely and then you actually she's saying this to ross you actually expanded the trade as a whole therefore you expanded that violence even as you perhaps took it out of the retail part of the drug trade you expanded it in the rest of the this supply chain so you know that's like i thought i was like wow that's that's actually quite interesting she made a lot of points like that that i thought were quite smart and she said also like you know you are making this argument um that you're different from an average drug kingpin out of

a place of privilege like you are no different from whatever uh guy in the bronx or whatever who is like handling the same flow of illegal narcotics and that's a fair point and uh you know i'm not going to you the fact that you are you have a master's degree that you were a eagle scout that you're this nice kid from texas like i'm not going to be swayed by that and i thought that that was all quite like interesting and um seemed almost wise and then she says like the conclusion of her argument which is like and therefore i sentence you to two life sentences in maximum security prison with no parole. And the whole room just like... There was like a deathly silence.

People just... I felt like I'd watched somebody be killed, like on the spot. It was so shocking. I just could not believe that that was the result that she was building towards. And... How did he react? I couldn't see his face.

Um, I could kind of, like, hear, like, gasps in the room, you know? Um, he was in front of me, facing the judge. And, uh... And I... I think that is not a reasonable sentence. I think it was a... in its own way, a miscarriage of justice. And, um... I don't know. i'm not sure that i believe that that um people deserve life sentence life sentences maybe even ever but um yeah but uh i don't know like certainly not in this case and probably not many other drug cases um even ones where people like purportedly whatever um even tried to have someone killed like it's uh

life is life yeah it's a long time and as the years have passed since then it's like i the it now feels like i now you know see i i knew immediately like this was wrong i did not you know i i hope that like you can see that i have like a very nuanced view of Ross. Yes, yes, you do. I think you have a very fair view. I think he had ideals. Those ideals were corrupted to some degree. I believe he tried to kill people. I don't believe he deserves to be like in a cage for the rest of his life, like decades and decades to come. He's been in there a decade now right exactly and like the more time that passes like the longer that it becomes clear that that's a how long life is uh and the wronger it feels to

me um but you know I I also when I say this I feel like it's worth saying a lot of people in prison for life are there unjustly and agreed just the fact that like i followed this case that ross is super interesting doesn't like make him doesn't even deserve he doesn't deserve special treatment but he but it is it is nonetheless like one example of a pretty unjust sentence sometimes in these types of arguments it kind of turns into everything else where you get the two loudest crowds one being lock them up forever and throw away the key and the other being yeah we really shouldn't punish people we're over incarcerated and everything and it's like i recognize the punishment and

retribution part of it the nuance of that and i recognize the nuance of we're way over incarcerated and you know we have some archaic sentences and stuff. And I kind of try to live right here with things as I do on a lot of things. And it's like, as I said on this case in particularly, yeah, he had to get punished for this. It's just I don't think it's a stretch or ridiculous for people to say that like other cases, as you point out, that we're not talking about right now, maybe people from less privilege as as well those sentences that sometimes are handed out that could be archaic like this are wrong and it's it's very hard to break down a case period when you're looking at every you know who was all affected drug trade affects thousands of people millions of people sometimes depending on how big you are in this case i'd say it's probably millions and it's like you know how do you put how do you put it a time

on that how do you put also like the value of it being shut down already on that how do you put a deterrent on that too and one of the things in your book is that the deterrent didn't work too well not at all and that's another thing that that i that I heard Judge Forrest say in that room was like, basically, like, I am punishing the hell out of you to make you an example of Ross Ulbricht to prevent, as she put it, like somebody from walking in your misguided footsteps or picking up your flag or something like that. And so he was essentially being punished not only for himself himself but for the crimes of like anybody who would follow him and that did not work at all like in fact um i wrote a story at one point about this study of the dark web drug trade and of course the dark web drug trade did not end with the Silk Road. But the dark web drug trade on the dates that Ross Ulbrich's sentence was handed down actually increased significantly, in part just because of the people were so shocked. And the news around this life sentence was enough to actually bring just more attention to something that people still didn't know that much about at the time. This was, I think, 2015 that he was sentenced and so and you know more just put a spotlight on the the people i

think just learned from that news oh you can buy drugs on the dark web and that that trade actually just continued to explode and um the silk road is being taken down just as happens in the drug war created a power vacuum that was just immediately filled first by the Silk Road to which was a kind of copycat site that was itself taken down in part because as you said it was created by people who had worked on the first Silk Road and were therefore identified quite easily yeah yeah and that was because of how they caught ross and everything and that's a very interesting story i'd love i'd love for you to recount because you spoke with him as you said july 4th 2013 i believe he was caught like three months later three four

months later right just three months yeah i think it was the end of october i think yeah something like that he was caught in san francisco yeah Francisco. Yeah, and he was working on his laptop, the laptop, in a public library. He had tried to work in a coffee shop and couldn't find an outlet for his laptop, and he like, sitting there in the science fiction section of the library working like looking out the window in a public place, you know, which I think he might have done in part so that if even if somebody could defeat his, the protections of tour, and find his IP address, it might look still like he you know, it would be less identifiable that because he was on some other network I don't know it ultimately was not a wise move because um he what happened just to like

describe it play by play I guess like he hears this these people having a fight behind him uh it's like some this man sort of like raises his fist to hit a woman behind him. He turns around and at that moment, another undercover agent across the table from him, a woman, grabs his laptop while it's still open. Yanks it out of his reach. He realizes that he's actually surrounded by undercover agents. He lunges for the laptop, but it's too late. Another agent has got him in a bear hug.

And his laptop is open, logged into the Silk late. Like some another agent has got him in a bear hug. And his laptop is open logged into the Silk Road. He's got like, you know, if he had just he had, as I think I said, his encryption on his laptop, so that if he had just managed to shut the lid, then it would have been encrypted. You know, with encryption, modern encryption is strong enough that like, the FBI or whoever potentially might not have been able to crack that within human lifetimes using the strongest computers they've got. All he had to do was shut it. But yeah, so if he had just managed to shut the lid, he might have prevented them from getting so much of the evidence that they used against them. He might have actually walked, I think.

Yeah. But he didn't. And they got the laptop with everything. I mean, he had on this laptop, a journal of, you know, creating this little road, a logbook of like daily activities, all of his chats with all of the people working for him and Variety Jones and everything. So and like a spreadsheet of his net worth, all of his assets and things. as you said like he um at the same time he never spent most of the money that he was amassing like millions and millions

of dollars and bitcoin uh he just sat on it and lived this almost ascetic life in um in san francisco like renting a room and like a house with other people and um you know he he when i interviewed him even you know he like uh he said to me like he spends almost none of his money stays under the radar and that was absolutely true he and i think that's because he was not like as i said he's not scarface he was a guy with principles doing this for some reason, some motivation other than money. Yeah. Yeah. And he – when they caught him, obviously they raided his place and everything.

And so they found the flash drives that had the Bitcoin on it. And I can't remember now. A lot of it was on his laptop also. It was on his laptop too. Okay. So do they have that still today or did they auction that off? I think that all of the Silk Road coins were eventually auctioned. Yeah.

In the years that followed. Yeah. We didn't really talk about like how he was found though. I mean, we should. Yeah, yeah. Let's do that. So even though the Silk Road was online for two and a half years, his Bitcoins were not traced to identify him like it still seems as late as as you know 2013 2014 that Bitcoin could not be traced to like find someone when even in the in his trial when they followed

the money from his server to his laptop that seemed like cheating because you have you've already identified the computers at both ends and they they had identified his server by the way through what i think was a vulnerability and likely a vulnerability in the tor anonymity software that's what i wanted to ask you about i forget the details now and i actually should have looked at that earlier i didn't remember that before we we went on camera but there was even obviously it wasn't you that wrote it but there were were a couple other articles. I believe one of them was in Wired when this all came out that did describe why every hacker known to man, like a lot of the big names I should say, went on record saying there is no possible way that Chris Tarbell and the cyber team at the FBI could have accessed this legally. They got this illegally.

It was in Iceland or something. I don't know, probably kind of inside baseball for the hacker world, but there was in Iceland or something. I mean, Ross was not like an expert hacker or cybersecurity expert. You know, he did the best he could for somebody who was making it all up as he went along. But it did seem likely to me and many like other people examining the case that there was an actual vulnerability in the Tor anonymity network itself that was somehow exploited to identify this server and and that it wasn't just like ross had made a screw up you know and um that would be important because it would suggest that the fbi had some vulnerability in tor at least way back in 2013 then when that went to when that when his case like was going to trial and pre-trial hearings um the defense basically said like uh um well if we think that you uh use some secret vulnerability in tor to do this that

you didn't it wasn't just a mistake like and if so then is that a Fourth Amendment violation? You basically hacked this server, Ross's Silk Road server, without a warrant. Yep. And you need to tell us how you did this. And the prosecution, very tellingly, I think, did not say, like, we didn't hack it. Here's how we did it. They instead said, listen, even if we did hack it, here's why it's not a Fourth Amendment violation. And the reasons were like quite legalistic. Like one was that Ross Ulbricht had never claimed it was his server. So how could it be a Fourth Amendment violation of his privacy

if he won't say it's his server, which is like this terrible catch-22, you know? And then the other one was that it's located in a foreign country it was it was in iceland so you you know the the fbi the nsa even whatever can like hack a foreign server if it doesn't have an american involved without a warrant and didn't they say like the vulnerability was something with a captcha right the the story initially was was that ross ulbricht had set up the captcha on the silk road right it's like you know the scrambled letters are like used to log into the silk road that that leaked the ip address but then when that was questioned the prosecution essentially said well listen we're not going to tell you how we did it but we don't need to the thing is like even if we did hack it like it's

not a fourth amendment violation so let's just move on and And that's what happened. In fact, the defense kind of seemed like they were trapped by this. They couldn't say like, okay, well, this is Russell Brick's server and he has a privacy right to it because they didn't want to admit that it was his server. Yeah, I need to, like I said, I need to go look at that again. I should have been more ready for that but it just it just didn't look like i think the way you just described it like catch 22 is the best way to describe how it got through because it the way that they went to defend it made no sense and then they fell back on the well then admit it's yours exactly so and um you know anyway so i think that that's how i think that there's definitely like on it whatever i have my own theories about how the fbi found the silk road server and then they

had his laptop they actually identified ross ross they got the name ross ulbricht for the first time from a very like silly kind of mistake he made that was alfred right the irs guy yeah there was an irs agent um gary alford who was just essentially googling um and he he had seen this post of someone like seeming to promote the silk road on a drug forum under the name altoid i think this is if i can remember correctly that's right and then altoid had also been a username that was posting to a coding forum saying can anybody help me with web development on some other project that Ross Ulbricht was doing and he had listed his email address in that second post Ross Ulbricht gmail.com tried to delete it but it was like captured in somebody's response to the message so that was the first time that law enforcement came upon his name

and ultimately uh that plus the server was how they got him and they got to him in san francisco so they bagged him and everything but you were starting this explaining about the the genesis of your book which is the bitcoin traceability right i think if i remember correctly this also this had to do with carl force and seanges, the DEA and Secret Service agents who were dirty in this case. This is really where the story of my book begins. Like the Silk Road case is something that I covered many. You know, I tell all this in the book, but just almost like in passing to try to get to this. So there's one IRS agents, IRS criminal investigator, Tigran Gambarian.

So you've always been picky about your produce. there's one IRS agent, IRS criminal investigator, Tigran Gambarian. So you've always been picky about your produce. But now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details. He was based inland at the time and um his superiors were i think a bit annoyed that like um they had been left out of the silk road case but then tigrin got a tip from a cryptocurrency exchange where you buy and sell you know bitcoins whatever for traditional money that like what that this uh mysterious guy Karl Mark Force

was cashing out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins from on some unknown origin through this exchange couldn't tell the exchange where they came from it seemed kind of fishy Dekrin immediately figured out Karl Mark Force is one of those Baltimore agents investigating the Silk Road. He was a DEA agent. He was undercover with Ross. He had been undercover on the Silk Road, yes. And Tigran, the IRS agent in Oakland, starts digging in. And he's like, I need to – I think that Karl Mark Force was taking taking was on the take essentially from the silk road

like uh that he's that he carl mark force also believing that bitcoin was untraceable was like doing the kind of typical corrupt cop thing of like just grabbing whatever money was available uh and also even there was evidence that he that he he had started to encrypt his conversations, his undercover conversations with the Dread Pirate Roberts so that even law enforcement couldn't read them. Karl Mark Force was secretly communicating. So you know, this looks really suspicious, but Tigran is like, I just need to prove that he's getting paid, that Karl Mark Force's dirty Bitcoins are coming from the Silk Road.

How am I going to do that? Everybody tells him Bitcoin is untraceable road how am i going to do that everybody tells him bitcoin is untraceable that's not going to help you and tigran working for the irs being a forensic accountant and the irs criminal investigations unit is is a division is kind of a strange animal it's like these forensic accountants who also like have guns and yeah people don't know about this but yeah yeah very real and so he's but he also is like a you know he has like he's somewhat of a computer nerdy guy as well and he had looked at bitcoin and thought like you know this blockchain thing that powers bitcoin it does seem like it it's has every transaction listed there like i must be able to figure out which addresses.

The blockchain only includes Bitcoin addresses, no identifying information. But he's like, I can see money moving from address to address. If I can just crack this, then maybe I can follow the money and prove where Karl Marx Forrest's Bitcoins came from. So he essentially did this, just with no training. He just sort of invented techniques on the fly, like it was actually like working in his living room with his like baby daughter in his lap after hours. And he traced Karl Mark forces money this DEA agents

and proves that he had been paid by the Dread Pirate Roberts hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of Bitcoin, and that he was essentially acting as like dread pirate roberts hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin and that he was essentially acting as like a double agent inside the dea selling material selling investigative material like information to the dread pirate roberts as a mole and uh yeah he that was the first time that i mean this case what about gonniger though and chain analysis well yeah so even then after carl mark force had been identified as the first time anybody was ever identified through cryptocurrency tracing as having done something criminal even after this dea agent force was identified there was still another sum of like hundreds of thousands of dollars of bitcoin that

was missing, that everybody could see it come out of the Silk Road, but nobody could see where it had gone. And Tigran, everybody else, like on the case, his prosecutors and everybody thought like the Karl Mark force must have taken that too. Tigran was the only one who thought like, this looks different. It's like the way that the money is moving here looks like somebody else. He traced that money too and found that it was a second corrupt agents this time a Secret Service agent also in Baltimore that there were two dirty agents one acting as a mole one just stealing money from the Silk Road he was yeah so he was Secret Service but he was working directly with Force like they were both

there amazing screen thing right amazingly they were not even aware of each other they it was just like seemingly a coincidence that they you know or maybe who knows i don't want to like cast dispersions on the culture of law enforcement in baltimore but like but they made the wire already but they they both like seemed to believe that they could get away with this because of this myth that bitcoin was like untraceable money that you could you could just grab as much of it as you wanted and nobody could could follow the money and prove what you had done and they were both wrong and they both spent time in prison um and that's got like six seven years i think right they're both out now i guess so i

think like a bit less than that but close to that that. Yeah. But as you said, in that second case, Tigran had met this guy, Michael Groninger, this Danish guy. On the Sean Bridges case, you're saying? Yes. And Michael Groninger was like a sort of old school Bitcoiner who had worked at a cryptocurrency cryptocurrency exchange like very technically brilliant guy who saw the potential to actually who not only saw that like bitcoin was traceable uh but built a company in a very specific tool called reactor to do that he was the founder of a company called chain analysis right which today still is like the leading cryptocurrency tracing firm but his Right, right. that he figured out again there's something to do with when you do a bitcoin transaction on the blockchain there's a sending wallet a receiving wallet and i don't think it's called a wop but

a change address is that it yeah so to be clear like michael groninger not to complicate things too much but he was not the one who came up with all these techniques there was a a woman right sarah micklejohn at university of California, San Diego, who was an academic researcher. And she was the first one with her co-authors of this paper that was published even before the Silk Road was taken down, that showed that there was this kind of bag of tricks that could be used. I mean, the blockchain looked like, if it wasn't anonymous, it was at least pseudonymous. Like you could see money moving from address to address, but if you couldn't anonymous, it was at least pseudonymous. Like you can, you could see money moving from address to address. But if you couldn't figure out who owned which address,

then you can't follow the money can't prove anybody is involved. But she started to think of tricks that allowed you to connect somebody's identity to their blockchain at to their Bitcoin addresses. And you were just describing one, I mean mean the an even simpler one is like uh called like basically it's called multi-input transactions this sounds technical but it's pretty simple to spend money from to spend the bitcoins at a certain address you have to control the key for that address if you spend uh all the bitcoins at multiple addresses at the same time then you must control the keys for all those addresses if you do that in one transaction. So you look at that transaction and you say, oh, I can see that every one of these addresses

must have been controlled by the same person or organization. So you're already starting, instead of looking at a bunch of distinct addresses, you're looking at groups of addresses, clusters is what she calls them, that all must belong to one person or service or something and then another one is change addresses like you there was this there is i think this property of many bitcoin wallets that when you spend all the money at an address you can't just spend a fraction of it you have to like smash open the whole piggy bank send all the money to the recipient and then get change back for whichever portion of it you didn't intend to spend that change goes to a new address if you can identify that new address as the change address

often because it looks very new and the other address that the money went to is not new it's like somebody who's received money there before, then that change address, you can tell, oh, that change address belongs to the sender because that's where they got back their change. So then you can follow the money from the original sender to their change to where they send it again. And this is called a peel chain because it's like, this is Sarah Micklejohn's term for it,

a peel chain because it's like this is sarah micklejohn's term for it right appeal chain because it's like you've got this water like a roll of bills and you're like you take one bill out of the roll hand it to somebody then you put it back in a different pocket but it still belongs to you you put the rest of the bills back in a different pocket then you pull it out again you spend one more you like peel off a bill then you put that wad of bills back into another pocket but that's what a bills always belongs to the same person now if you can follow that wad of bills until it hits a cryptocurrency exchange or even go back in time to see like where it originated like where somebody spent dollars to buy that wad of digital whatever bitcoins then you can if your law enforcement agency send a subpoena to the exchange and force them to hand over identifying information a lot of times is there a

way sometimes when i start thinking about this especially when we visualize the actual process like that i'll in my head temporarily i'll mix up like exchange with like what isn't considered an exchange and everything. But maybe a good broad question here is that while this takes a lot of work and is hard to do, the bottom line is that this can be done and governments, for example, can trace Bitcoin transactions. But is there a way that you can do – let's just stay with Bitcoin, Bitcoin transactions and not be traced? That's a really good question. You know, I read Sarah Mikkelson's paper and I was like, oh, I see. Like sometimes it's possible. I read it in 2013 when the Silk Road was still online, when everybody still believed that it was possible to spend Bitcoins in an untraceable way.

But you were still surprised at trial in 2015 when they said they did it well see like that's the thing like i read that paper and i was like i see like it's if you screw up and like leave these traces then you can be they can follow the money but anybody who's smart like um you know would find ways to avoid that and uh so it seemed like it was still possible if you stayed a step ahead to avoid that that kind of tracing and for you know because like it seemed like it was still possible if you stayed a step ahead to avoid that kind of tracing. And for, you know, because like... It's like they never traced Satoshi that we know of. Well, I think that is actually because Satoshi never spent any of his Bitcoins or cashed them out or had to interact with an exchange or did much of anything.

I mean, that's... But it is true he's like the one he or she or whatever is the one individual who has defied like every attempt to identify them uh yeah so it sounds like and i could be putting words in your mouth so correct me if i'm wrong it sounds like the answer's no like they'll be it may take a long time with some because they're sporadic transactions or limited history or whatever, but they could eventually use the two chains that are occurred – I don't know if they're chains, but the two addresses, I'm sorry, that occur within a transaction. As long as one has ever happened, they can figure out the geographic location where that came from perhaps well the thing is like if there there is a cat and mouse game here for and for I thought that like yeah the look at this paper like the cats have some cool tricks here but if you're a smart mouse you can stay

ahead it turns out I mean as cat and mouse games do this just like kept evolving. And the thing about the blockchain, this permanent record of every Bitcoin transaction is that if the cats like come up with a new trick, it's not just that like they can use that from then that point on to it to like trace new transactions, they can go back in time, look at the blockchain stretching back years which cannot be changed or erased it's copied out to thousands and thousands of computers and identify illegal whatever transactions you were trying to hide years ago and and so no i i i no longer have much of much confidence of any kind that you can do a bitcoin transaction with enough secrecy that it will stand withstand that test of like of time that like at no point in the future will these rather brilliant investigators like you know people like sarah micklejohn and then you know chain analysis this company that was created by Michael Groninger, I mentioned earlier, to kind of like weaponize her tools to build them into software and like has now been able to recruit all of the smartest forensic people to build trying to cook up scenarios in my head, probably doing a horrible job. But if I have – like if I have a USB drive that is my Bitcoin, which I do, right?

It's a drive. It doesn't exist on the internet. I have to plug it in and whatever, but I got that one day. Let's say I – let's say that some dude somewhere bought it and left it somewhere, and he didn't know who I was, and I came to pick it up for a predetermined sum of money or whatever. And then I go and I use that drive that was made by some manufacturer obviously, so that part's traceable. And I go somewhere else in the world and i start using it like could they they could find that how did you get those bitcoins in the first place that's a good question that's what i'm starting to think about what did you buy them from an exchange yeah so you're saying okay there's the question that's usually the the

cash in or cash out point is where people get caught right so it has to be through the exchange because they can subpoena the exchanges information to get the address any fill in the blanks that they need that's definitely like the most common way but by far I guess that it's it's also possible to I mean, the other trick that Sarah Mikkelson did was that she started doing essentially undercover transactions with services in the Bitcoin economy. So she moved her own Bitcoins into and out of the Silk Road repeatedly. Remember, this is when the Silk Road was still online. And then she would be able to see, oh, my money money went into that address and that must be a Silk Road address and because she'd

created she had those clustering techniques she could then see that's not just one Silk Road address that's part of a cluster of millions of Silk Road addresses so she then could identify millions of addresses and then see people's bitcoins going into them and and identify oh that's a that's a drug deal that's a drug deal that's a drug deal pretty much then the question is like who are those people doing those deals right and yeah you're right like most of the time you identify them through an exchange and in other cases like people back then especially would like post their Bitcoin addresses publicly like um soliciting donations or whatever uh but if you don't have that I guess I'm saying yeah it if I

mean the thing is like there's not that many like I guess if you mine the bitcoins that's potentially one way to do it without identify identification not that many people mine their own Bitcoins and then use them in a drug deal. Most people buy them from an exchange. And when you buy them from an exchange, almost always you have to give some identifying information. So if they mine them, not necessarily, but mining also takes not only significant energy and power and skill to do, but it happens slowly.

You can't just mine 100 bitcoin like that yeah i don't i mean uh i don't think there are very many people who i mean this is it's it's not something that i've like thought about that much or i hear about much but i suppose if you were uh if you wanted to be incredibly careful, you could mine Bitcoins yourself. I'm not even sure how this works anymore, because back in the early days of Bitcoin, you could just mine Bitcoins on your own computer. Today, most people contribute their computer's processing power to a mining pool, where you're helping, you're sharing your processing power and

then you get back like a fraction of the rewards and so that might mean that there is something traceable in the way that you receive that money from the mining pool so I don't know that I'm not sure that that's even that is a solution I haven't really examined enough but it's so rare I mean the people who are buying drugs on the silk road and we didn't get into this but i i ex as an experiment for forbes bought marijuana from three different dark web drug sites including the silk road and uh of course i i did not mine my own bitcoins i bought them from coinbase which was like an exchange and uh then as an experiment, once I read Sarah Micklejohn's paper, I gave her all my Coinbase addresses

in a kind of simulation of like, if she had subpoenas, Coinbase, this is what she would get. And I told her like, see what you can, can you trace my drug deals? And she immediately was able to identify this one, this amount of money

went to the Silk Road. This one went to this drug market. This one went this one see that you know what though now that i put that visual on it because everyone knows coinbase or is aware of what most people are aware of what coinbase is that doesn't seem that hard that actually that's very believable and and this was still in 2013 so even then i i believe that there was some privacy still possible with Bitcoins. But, you know, and then even the trial, as I said, you know, I was kind of surprised that they – I was surprised that they'd use this because I'd never seen it before. But it kind of still made sense and it still seemed like kind of an easy tracing case. What platform had they used within like the Silk Road community to buy and sell Bitcoin?

Mt. Gox? I think a lot of people did because that was all that existed in 2011. That was the only one in 2011? I think so, yeah. For a long time, there was just Mt. Gox. Then, you know, it's interesting you bring that up because after the Silk Road case

and the case against these two corrupt agents, which was truly like the first proof of concept Bitcoin tracing criminal case. The next big case that Chainalysis and Tigre and this IRS agent took on together was the theft of half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoins from Mt. Gox, which by 2014 had been like completely pillaged by unknown hackers actually nobody even knew where the money had gone but but you know had been bankrupted by what was either insider theft or hacker external theft of this massive sum of bitcoins and analysis took on this case like to figure out where that money had gone And the Frenchman who was in charge of that place was Mark Karpeles, is that right?

Mark Karpeles was the CEO and the creator of Mt. Gox. I'm sorry, he was not the creator. He acquired it. Mt. Gox was where, as you said, it was like the main exchange. It was where people went to buy and trade Bitcoin on the markets. And again, I keep on in my head, I'm trying to think of something else with that that I'll ask you about later. It was like the main exchange. It was where people went to buy and trade Bitcoin on the markets. And again, I keep on – in my head, I'm trying to think of something else with that that I'll ask you about later, but I'm going to say it wrong if I do right now, so we'll stay on this. hack in the history of cryptocurrency the platform was hacked and i don't know six hundred thousand eight hundred thousand some ridiculous number of bitcoins were stolen and the accusation was quickly oh carpolis might have been behind this and bezeled it out himself but very quickly the guys who you spoke with in your story which was was the IRS agent along with Groninger over at Chainalysis, they were brought into the case, at least Groninger was at first, and concluded that Karpolis was just incompetent and had left vulnerabilities and that, no, this was out there and they needed to go find it.

Exactly. I mean, Groninger, this Danish guy who – Keep saying Groninger. Sorry, Groninger. I mean, it's not even – I'm sure I'm saying it wrong, too. It's a Danish name. But he had now seen the potential in some of Sarah Micklejohn's tricks. And then Chainalysis very quickly started like venture funding and stuff and and uh was able to recruit like super smart people who uh were not publishing their their findings about how to trace cryptocurrencies but were like keeping these tricks secret in some cases i mean you and i can talk

about like how you trace bitcoins and what i know about how to do but there are definitely like now secret sauce techniques that chain analysis will not share with anybody about how to do it, but there are definitely like now secret sauce techniques that Chainalysis will not share with anybody about how they do it. So he actually, just as Chainalysis was getting started, took on this case pro bono. He actually, I think, saw it as like a way to help figure out who took this money so that we can solve this case, show that it's possible to hold people accountable for stealing, like, massive troves of Bitcoin. And also show that, like, that this is the criminal sums and, like, this is the criminal money and this is the clean money. And the whole Bitcoin economy is not, like, awash criminal money, because banks don't want to touch that, you know, they don't want to be accused of money laundering. So he took on this case. And at the same time, it happens as you as you were getting, I think that T. Grincon-Barian

was taking on a different case, which was this other coincidence almost. BTCE was by 2015 or 2014 this other competing exchange that had become a kind into it from all sorts of like from the dark web from ransomware which was a new phenomenon where people were extorting hackers were extorting people are you saying like the government could see this when they look using their tracing techniques exactly tigran can bury in chain analysis too could see this and yet nobody knew who ran btce it was this very mysterious weird exchange that was like existing out there but nobody even knew where it was based who had created it it was this very mysterious weird exchange that was like existing out there but nobody even knew where it was based who had created it it was the strange black hole and the whole bitcoin economy and it was actually getting very big it was um i think rivaling mount gox in size when

mount gox went offline was you know was so they had an incentive uh well it's more than that even so um this is where like the cases kind of strangely converge. Tigran and Michael Groninger were working separately, and they'd worked together on the Sean Bridges case. But then Michael Groninger, in his kind of pro bono capacity, helping out the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustees in Japan. Right, that's where it's based. He traced those stolen funds from mount gox on

the blockchain and showed that a big chunk of them was going were going into btce and at the same time uh tigrin essentially was working on the btce case and together they kind of once they saw that they their cases were once again kind of there was a kind of combination, a confluence of events here. They figured out that somebody named WME was that was their kind of pseudonym was feeding all of these hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins into BTCE. And that WME was an administrator of btce how did they figure out he was an admin I'm trying to remember like the whole um investigative like process here um I think essentially tigrin being a law enforcement agents had figured out where the btce server was located and of all places, it ended up being in Virginia,

just miles away from where he was then working in DC, and actually set up essentially a wiretap on that server. I mean, I think maybe it was more just like an image. They had located and copied the contents of it. Quick question on that, though, because I remember this in your book, and I remember going, that's kind of weird. But you said that he said, Tigran, he immediately ruled out that this was a honeypot CIA experiment or something. How do you immediately rule that out when you find the server four miles from Langley?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't know i mean that um i don't know maybe we can't rule it out maybe the cia was involved in running this shady exchange who knows um it's it it it's kind of like uh regardless btce was whether it was a cia um operation i don't know what like the end goal would have been just knowing where the story goes from there um but or whoever it was located right there in Virginia I think the tigrin ruled it out just probably because he comes from law enforcement and doesn't you know it's maybe not as skeptical of like intelligence as you or I might be but yeah by essentially finding the server, which was not that well hidden.

This was an exchange. It was on the open web. So you just had to have law enforcement capabilities to do that and getting an image of it to get all the contents of it, which they did stealthily so to not tip off the administrators. He could see all the accounts of the administrators, one of whom was WME, and all their communications. And then, working with Groninger, who was following the money, and also had the

Mt. Gox, the... This is a bit complicated because some of the money that was stolen from Mt. Gox was actually cashed out through Mt. Gox too oh yeah wasn't it like they found

part of the reason he ruled out Carpalus was because then they found like 200,000 bitcoin or something like that they were able to get it back yeah this is another part of the story that Carpalus after this whole bankruptcy was like oh i found like another it was a 200 i think 200 000 something like that um bitcoins but also um groninger could see when the bitcoins that

were stolen were being cashed out like what times of day um and just as a kind of loose um i mean this is not like a definitive clue but like he could see what times of day. And just as a kind of loose, I mean, this is not like a definitive clue, but like he could see what times of day this was happening. And it seemed to be happening in essentially like, you know, Russia, Middle East time zones, not where Karpelis was based in Japan or in fact, like any other, you know, anywhere in the US. And he immediately started to suspect that once you see that time zone, that in fact, this money was stolen by somebody in Russia.

Because that is, you know, that's always where we think of like these hackers being located. And unfortunately, that puts them beyond like the reach of a lot of law enforcement. But he and Tigran gumbarian then essentially combined their data and together showed that wme was both an administrator of btce and the person feeding the mount gox millions into btce that the same person had been involved as the kind of money launderer for the Mount Gox hackers that was working as one of them, as had created BTCE. Then in fact, likely BTCE,

this whole exchange was created just as a way to launder the Mount Gox heist, essentially. And then through other like kind of um like investigative techniques they they found like some slip-ups where wme had at one point like revealed his real name uh tigran also did the like a lot of like kind of more traditional internet detective work or law enforcement work where he um tracked his IPs around the world and eventually like found a hotel where WME had checked in and this is Alexander Vinnick turned out to be Alexander Vinnick this Russian guy so now this is essentially like the

the solution to the Mt. Gox mystery as far as anybody's ever cracked it that Alexander Vinnick was what not only like the kind of money man uh he's not been convicted of this essentially for the Mount Gox hackers the one who was sort of like his it was his job to like take the money right and clean it somehow but also he had perhaps not alone but had created btce a whole exchange that became itself a kind of extremely criminal bitcoin exchange cryptocurrency exchange just for the purposes of funneling this money into it like it's just an incredible incredible kind of ambition to create it's almost like creating your your own bank or your own wall street trading floor just to kind of like you know funnel in your money that you're you as like

a mafia don are um end up with on this as a problem like you have this liquidity problem so you create a whole financial institution to launder it that's what alexander vinnick is accused of doing he's he's been convicted of money laundering he's now you know he served time in in france of all places now he's been extradited to the us so uh you know i don't want to like he hasn't faced charges here i don't want to he's innocent until proven guilty of this stuff i guess but you're so fair he also i you know i interviewed him through his lawyer in prison and oh really he claims his innocence and he says he was set up but whatever you gonna testify for him a trial i don't testify anybody whenever possible

it's funny like that that's come up in another case in the book and like i i politely declined to get involved fair enough so they they bottom line is they end up finding this whole other exchange and we're i'm getting it mixed up but he he comes back with the what's it called i want video or something like that this is yeah i mean that's a case that like is comes back later and comes up later in the book um where it was essentially um you know maybe we'll get to this, but it was a massive dark web market for child sexual abuse videos. And he was allowing that market to exist. criminally tainted money laundering crypto exchange was helping you know was being used by some users of this essentially what we used to call child porn dark web site and that is part of that will come up later in that case okay but in the meantime i mean what was more important and this

has not really been told like very publicly before i don't think chain analysis never even really revealed their role in this case but michael grroninger and Tigran Kambarian solved the mystery of where that Mt. Gox money went and essentially helped to also to vindicate Mark Karpeles, who had been accused of stealing all this money. And instead, they showed that it seemed to be like at least a Russian-connected group of hackers that had taken it now that you know i don't think anybody's got back their mount gox bitcoins but it um because it's still like an it's kind of tied up in this endless legal limbo but that was the the kind of first case where i mean the silk road corrupt agents was the proof of concept mount gox was the case where it became clear just how powerful these tracing techniques would be that you can often crack like what seemed like, you know, cold cases. And I would say that's kind of the beginning of this new era of the golden age of the golden era of cryptocurrency tracing where people like Tigran and Michael Groninger at Chainalysis would just be involved in. Their clients are the government effectively right i mean their chain analysis sells its techniques to exchanges where they kind of are like trying themselves to not be used for money laundering they have like their own laws they have to follow and stuff but then also yes like

chain analysis has all these government contracts and they work with every law enforcement agency practically and they've become a secret weapon for cracking like so many kinds of cybercrime and just illicit activity if it involves a blockchain it can't be traced it's the exact opposite of what you know i and even perhaps satoshi and so many other people thought in 2011, like, cryptocurrency is extremely traceable, or at least Bitcoin is and many others. And that has been used as a incredibly powerful lever to just like crack open so many, what, you know, seemed like uncrackable cybercriminal cases. See, if that's true, and it clearly is, by the way, it's kind of inarguable that if people take at least certain actions, and there's a lot of little as much of a tinfoil hat and start thinking about, all right, who are the powers that be in the world, be it governments or individuals associated with governments, etc., who don't want to see things like Bitcoin or crypto in general succeed.

You got to think they're out there as fronts buying into these things. I mean that whole Doquan Luna thing, that was one of the most obvious government psyops I've ever seen in my life. I mean, they- Remind me who that is. That's the dude, and I'm really uneducated talking about the full ins and outs of this, but that's the guy who ran Luna and the whole platform that crashed. I'm trying to bring it back to me. Maybe this was like six months ago, something like that, where essentially he was creating a stable coin that was benchmarked to Bitcoin. So what happened was when the house of cards came down, it also pulled the price of Bitcoin down, which as we know, Bitcoin is the one cryptocurrency out of all of them that doesn't have like a centralized company or something around it. We don't know Satoshi. It's this totally – government can't just go in and like invade Bitcoin.

So they have to find other ways in. And so when you see what this kid was trying to do, it just seems fairly obvious that like clearly this was a way to attack the currency. But what I'm getting at with the traceability is that if you had – let's just go with governments as an example. If you had China and the US and Russia, that would probably – Russia – I feel like Vladimir Putin was probably earlier some of this stuff. But if you had governments like that out there buying Bitcoin, hypothetically people like Ambarian and stuff would know that now because they'd be able to trace it but there has to be a way that that they're deep enough and far enough away without any identifying markers as far as who's doing the buying on their behalf that we haven't figured out who the quote-unquote five percent whale of bitcoin is or something like that i do believe that i mean satoshi is is like whatever um yeah exhibit number one yeah like it's possible to mine a ton of bitcoin and sit on it never do anything with it and perhaps you cannot be traced or um you know it might be

possible with like just enough restraints or enough just like doing as little as possible with your coins uh to use themously. But this is what I have essentially thought over the years. Well, okay, so you can be traced if you do this. But if you do this, then you'll be okay. Oh, well, actually, no, it turns out they figured out a way to trace that. Oh, if you put it, if you put your money through a mixing service, that like, you know, mixes up your coins with other people's and then sends back to you like untraceable coins that should work oh actually no it looks like they can defeat that um in fact they busted many of these mixers themselves um oh well what if you like uh maybe like flashing forward to almost the more like the present day almost what if you use

monero a coin that is designed to be untraceable from the start and builds in its sort of mixing capabilities into the protocol of the coin itself so that every monero transaction is mixed up with other people's transactions and has all these privacy untraceable you know properties and features um at least that must be untraceable. Actually, well, it looks like, I mean, the evidence, this is, Monero people don't like it when I talk about this. But there are cases where it appears very likely that Monero was traced. And I've seen a leaked Jane Alice's presentation documented, like it was the, the, this is like flashing forward, almost like the end of the story of the book, but where the Italian police received a presentation from Chainalysis, the leaked presentation is in Italian, where they say that they can trace

Monero with some probability, if not certainty. And that's often good enough, because as a prosecutor, you can then just start sending out subpoenas to every possibility that people don't realize that like you don't have to um you know it's not like creating some some different possibilities or confusion is not a reasonable cause is enough exactly so um the story you know i i just, it's it, I do still actually believe that it's possible to use cryptocurrency. untraceably. I don't think it's possible with Bitcoin. I don't think it's possible with most cryptocurrencies. The only one that I truly am like confident saying today is untraceable is

Zcash, which maybe you I don't know if you've heard of it. It's like it fully encrypts its blockchain, uses like very clever new fangled kinds of encryption to do this, uses something called a zero knowledge proof so that you can essentially confirm that a transaction is real and happens on the blockchain, but without revealing any information about it. But sorry, this is like beyond um like sort of technical capacity too but but zcash does appear to be untraceable but then again like i i remind myself sometimes i thought the same thing about

bitcoin back in 2011 so um every time that i've thought like oh this seems like we actually uh this seems like if that wasn't untraceable, at least this must be the cats, like, catch up in this cat and mouse game. But if, maybe I'm thinking this wrong, but I'm just trying to play hypothetical here. If somebody on behalf of, let's say, the U.S. government, let's make it simple. Somebody goes on, gets a brand new wallet,

makes a huge purchase, maybe over time in a bunch of tranches, to the same wallet, takes it off chain. So they take it off the server, right? So in this case, they would never use Coinbase, but let's just say it was Coinbase. Take it off Coinbase, and they put it somewhere. Well, now it's on a flash drive. No one can see where it's going. And then it switches hands a bunch, gets to the right people, gets to Jerome Powell at the Federal – I'm just making it very easy – gets to Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve. He then has it. You can't really – like you'd have to do a whole case behind the scenes to find out that he's the one who actually bought it. But hypothetically it could be done, but they could set it up in a way that makes it like impossible to get there governments i'm saying well the thing is like you might not like a

when you sure you can like take your bitcoins out of an exchange put them at an address that you host yourself where the keys for that are on your usb drive hide that in a popcorn can under the floorboards of your bedroom closet this is actually that's literally what i'm talking about yeah that happened this was a case described earlier this week but by the way but it doesn't matter because the the fact is like if if uh those coins like if they can then subpoena the coinbase the exchange where you got those coins they get your identity they like figure out oh like the coins move to this address we don't know where the keys for that address are but we know the name of the guy who holds them so we're going to go raid his house and we'll look under all of his floorboards and find your you know they it's still there yeah yeah so so i mean what actually i'm referring to is like earlier this week a guy who hacked the silk road in 2012 and stole 50 000 bitcoins from the Silk Road because of a vulnerability in it then sat on those

coins for a decade uh was identified he was I mean he was identified last year but the Department of Justice just announced this he was identified I think because he had interacted with an exchange probably cashing out like a very small amount of those coins but that was enough for them to get his identity and literally find these bitcoins on our hard drive under the floorboards of his bedroom closet and this is brand new it happened on they announced they revealed this for the first time on Monday so when they seized those 50 000 bitcoins from him in November of last year, they were worth $3.36 billion because he had sat on them for so long. But the, but, you know, it's also just a testament to the fact that like the blockchain had, had recorded his transactions

years ago, and that was enough for him to be caught you know you it's just uh okay i i have the sorry i was making a face there but i have the article up here so this is the one you're talking about this is last yeah yeah that's like last week that's the case yeah how is it i was confused about how did we get to because i see the number here too how did we get to – because I see the number here too. How did we get to 3.36 billion when it was only – oh, that's not a point. That's a comma. Never mind. I was reading it, and it looked like it said 50.676 Bitcoin, but it says 50,600. Okay. Yeah. All right. Now it makes sense. 50,000 bitcoins was 3.36 billion dollars, which at the time, at that time would have been actually the biggest seizure, not only of cryptocurrency, but of any currency of any kind that the

Department of Justice had ever made. But then actually just a few months later, they did an even bigger one. But I don't know if you want to get into that. There was like this, this is, you know, this is like comes right at the end of the story of my book so it's not a story i really tell like this this biggest case of all time is just one that that uh unfolded just as i was finishing the book so it's only mentioned like in the epilogue but there was this case of this new york couple maybe you've seen like the rap videos of one of the this the woman in this couple um she goes by razzlecon and she and her husband uh who was like a Russian American guy were

accused of laundering 4.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoins that were stolen from a yet another exchange bitfinex uh and is that the guy is that where the general counsel frost was from? Let's see who worked with he was the guy who caught for Carl force on The on the the de-aging on the Silk Road case He was going back and forth wound because he was the general counsel and he was like this guy sketchy and he went to the Government it turned out it was one of their own and then they know that's about that Well, he was working in a different exchange uh bit stamp bit stamp okay um yeah he's the one going

back to the that story he gave he was the one who gave t-grand the tip that he saw these dirty bitcoins coming in right that led to like the takedown of these corrupt agents um but this was a different case like 2016 i think is when maybe 2017 was when finx was hacked I think 120 000 bitcoins were taken in that case and um at the time of that they those were seized in early this this year uh 3.6 billion dollars at least was recovered of the 4.5 billion dollars worth stolen I did see this case it's coming back to me it's uh yeah it's mostly gotten a lot of attention not just because of that it's it set this record but also because uh the woman of this in this couple um had made these like egregiously cringy rap videos i mean like truly yeah they're not great they're not great i i remember this now so they had they had like 95

000 bitcoin or something like that i don't know that i can't remember the math but it would have been 3.6 billion dollars worth that was taken in that case but why didn't and by the way that was irs criminal investigations who did that case chain analysis won't say that they were involved but they were almost certainly involved and it's the same people who are the subjects of my book who carry that out i mean they just truly have broken their own records one after another. But the original one you were talking about that they just announced where the guy had it under his floorboards and everything. Why are they just announcing that now if they did it exactly a year ago?

Because I think he just took a plea agreement. Oh, okay. He just took a guilty plea. So that's how we found out. Yeah. Interesting. a plea agreement oh he just took a guilty plea yeah interesting i mean the poor guy like hacked the silk road in 2012 and sat on the money for 10 years and now faces like time in prison and had to forfeit all of that money it's a tough day but you know what you couldn't take like 10 million

of it just like like you had 10 years just like take 10 million out of there do something you know maybe just like run off to some non-extradition country no go to russia do something i think he yeah he was in he was in georgia and that's where georgia the country no the state unfortunately for him where he uh yeah where and that's where his popcorn can full of 50,000 bitcoins was found as well. Tough day. And it's actually reminding me, would you say that I had on John Boziak, who's – he was one of the biggest credit card scammers from America during the heyday of carding. And I was reminded of it when I was reading your book because vinik who was wme one of the creators of btce that we were just talking about he was a russian guy and it said that he got his whole

start in carding like that's what he was i think maybe you're thinking of that actually is a good segue into like the next major case of the book but but you're thinking of alexander khaas oh i am you're right you're right okay so yeah we are going to talk about alpha bay actually no i'm sorry you're you're you are correct so i didn't mean to just like inject the segway but the but vinik also had a carding background maybe i read it on both i can't remember they both they both did but then like the um the next like sort of major case of the book is i think of him more as like a carter who became a became the next dark web kingpin right so just right before we get to that though because this was a quick aside just bringing it up i talked with john a bit about the history of carding obviously and how all that blew up because credit

cards obviously became a huge thing in the 90s and then as the late 90s ended and got into the 2000s and things were extremely computerized, this entire industry just took off. The heyday was during the 2000s for sure, which is when he was in it. But a lot of the how in china for example they excel at math more than us because their numeric system is much much better like it's easier for a younger kid to learn the full system as opposed to us where we got to change the language at each hundred and thousand whatever but he was saying it's like a similar thing with the Russians and Ukrainians with coding where there's certain things in their language that are easier than to translate to being able to code something as opposed to when we learn it I've never heard

that before I don't know that could be I might have made that up I feel like that I mean I would just say like culturally these ex-soviet countries have like are they're very uh they have like a history of of of amazing education in math computer science and science and then um a lot of poverty and that's like that is a mix that creates like incredible criminal hackers you know okay plus plus just the corruption of governments there historically is like meant that you can hack people like in the west where the money is and you know perhaps pay off the right local guy when they won't extradite you or anything yeah there's no extradition treaties right especially in russia more much more so than Ukraine today I mean that this is no longer true since the kind of like bifurcation of like Russian and Ukrainian geopolitical paths like but uh Russia is absolutely that story like but it's interesting to note and

you know maybe we can get into this at some point too that like credit card theft is certainly still happening but like russian cyber criminals now since the advent of cryptocurrency really have very much switched over to ransomware as the even more profitable kind of hacking where you lock up you know as a whole network of like inside of a company or a government agency or a hospital or a school or like whatever and it demands a cryptocurrency ransom right and that's actually like a much faster way to get paid for your hacking uh it's a much more disruptive and like you know truly dangerous and um terrible for society form of hacking even then credit card fraud I would say but you don't have to like figure out what to do with all

these credit cards figure out how to use them for fraud you just get paid by the victim right away you know what we now know is a traceable transaction yeah so that I feel like I'm skipping ahead in this story it's okay but but uh i do try to in the book you know examine like if cryptocurrency is so traceable why is it that ransomware remains this is sort of the like near the end of the book like why does it remain this scourge on society i mean i'm sure you're like aware of some of the, I mean, everybody has seen like the ways that it's just been like this plague where like one company after another coughs up like millions and millions of dollars in extortion payments just to try to keep doing business. I mean, the biggest example was Colonial Pipeline. like the most disruptive where this company that controls a pipeline that distributes gasoline to like the whole eastern seaboard was hit by ransomware and uh they had to shut down

the pipeline essentially and that caused like this fuel crunch and huge disruption across the east coast and uh turns out that like they actually even had paid the ransom they paid these hackers five million dollars that is one case actually where the fbi was able which analysis is help by the way to follow the money figure out where it was and recover millions of dollars of it not the whole amount they haven't really said how that was possible the the problem is that even if you can follow the money if it goes Beyond U.S borders or if the hackers themselves are in Russia you're still stuck like you that just means that you can watch yourself getting robbed see where

the the getaway car went to but it's totally beyond your reach you know like the tracing alone is not always enough even with alexander vinik the russian guy like convicted of being of his involvement in the mount gox theft he only got caught because he went on vacation with his family to greece and that's where he was arrested and extradited from right so like if you if they're smart enough to like stay in a non-extradition country and not go on vacation and like the wrong you if they're smart enough to like stay in a non-extradition country and not go on vacation and like the wrong place then they're untouchable and like tracing is not enough that's why i think they don't care about being caught essentially that's interesting though but like what about like the north korean government hackers like

another example i think of like they're you know they're not likely based most of the time in North Korea, they're based in China, usually, is what I'm told. But, but again, there's no extradition treaty with China, then China is supportive enough of North Korea that they're not going to, you know, hand over North Korean hackers, even though it is very often possible, I think, to trace these massorea doesn't use ransomware attacks most of the time they just steal massive amounts of cryptocurrency billions of dollars worth of it uh per you know on a yearly basis these days and they're using that to fund you know horrific things and they're working regime including like you know their nuclear weapons

development and that can be traced and chain analysis has can follow that money but you can't do anything about it right they don't care they're just it's purely transactional they're looking to get in get their money and then they don't care if you catch them they already have the money right and you can't you can't extradite them you can't lay hands on them so you can follow the money but that just again tells you exactly how badly you're being robbed and like how much all of these cryptocurrency companies are accidentally funding the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea you know it's it doesn't solve the problem so you know that's just to say that like tracing is not a silver bullet like it's

it seems extremely powerful for actually identifying the culprit but sometimes the culprit can't be caught still it's a geographical problem at the end of the day absolutely a geopolitical problem yeah interesting so we left off though with the actual outline of some of the things in the book because there was there's a ton in the book that we're just not going to get to today and people are going to have to buy it again check out the ton in the book that we're just not going to get to today, and people are going to have to buy it. Again, check out the link in the description, Tracers in the Dark. But the Vinik story kind of got left off because, again, he wasn't in those extraditable countries and whatever. And so they knew who he was, but they couldn't really do anything about it. They had uncovered essentially who was behind the mount gox hack but in the meantime after silk road goes

offline in 2013 you had mentioned there was like silk road 2 and some of the people who had been involved in silk road launched at least that platform and maybe another one in the year afterward but they were quickly caught because all the data on who they were was on ross was on ross's laptop and also actually because there was another vulnerability in tor that one was like confirmed and in 2014 that was used in like another kind of like just round up of uh a bunch of dark websites not a lot in a lot of cases the government found a vulnerability essentially you're saying it was actually like this group of researchers at carnegie mellon who then gave it to the government uh pretty well confirmed yeah and in that case

like it the um a lot of those dark web drug markets taken down with that vulnerability it was just a server that was found and it wasn't the actual administrator somebody was like arrested and jailed in many of those cases as far as i know but with the silk road too they were in part because their identifying information was on ross ulbrich's laptop okay so they because they knew who they were they were able to get them but the other ones they were able to at least get in there through a vulnerability and shut down right however there was one that rose up that went beyond the scope of Silk Road. Silk Road, as we laid out, did mostly drugs. It had some guns on there as well, some hacking tools a little bit, and that was pretty much it for the most part.

So as we were just talking about, Russell Briggs' life sentence was meant to deter the next dark web drug lord, but that did not work and silk road 2 popped up then another site called like evolution took over and then evolution actually ran ran off with everybody's money just to show yes their lack of sort of you know dread pirate roberts principles if you want to describe them that way and then that site was replaced by another one which went offline and then the real subject of like our office of really like the centerpiece case in some ways of the book uh this market comes online called alpha

bay that would eventually grow to be 10 times the size of the silk road transacting like millions of dollars of drugs a day but the interesting thing that you know I uh we were getting at is that like Alpha Bay what sort of got its start uh as a Carter dark web site like it was it was founded by this guy Alpha O2 nobody knew who that was but his username but Alpha O2 uh was a known sort of notorious credit card fraudster who had even published like a guide to credit card fraud but then alpha o2 is kind of like big idea was to combine the dark web sphere of credit card fraud and and drugs into one massive market which was which would become alpha bay and what year is this approximately so alpha bay launched i guess in let's see was it 2015. i'll check it was 20 sounds right for a long time it

was not like particularly distinguished it was only in late 2016 or around like actually the middle of 2016 that alpha bay became the biggest dark web drug market when like other sites were going offline. Yeah, it says it, this is straight off Wikipedia. It says it reportedly launched in September 2014, pre-launched in November 2014 and officially launched December 22nd, 2014. So roughly the end of 2014.

Right, but then, so it launched, but was not distinguished for years. And then only after these other sites went offline did it kind of begin to grow, not only into the biggest dark web market at the time but the biggest dark web market ever i think it was around mid-2016 that it surpassed even the peak size of the silk road and was still growing and at this point like law enforcement is looking at this site i mean they they've taken down the silk road and taken all these other sites but this one seemed somehow to like not have made those mistakes like it didn't have the vulnerabilities like um the uh and and essentially Alpha O2 began to seem like this kind of potentially untouchable figure like I've heard

this from prosecutors and investigators like there was this real fear that maybe this time they've encountered somebody who they cannot reach. And it has a lot to do with what we were just talking about. Alpha-02 gave this impression of being Russian. There were no real rules on Alpha Bay, except, like, no child porn, no child sexual abuse materials. Actually, no murder for hire allowed either.

But otherwise, anything goes. There was no victimless crime here like you could sell People stolen data like, you know, that was a huge part of the business But you could not sell the stolen data of Russians or people from the former Soviet Union That was a rule on the site and it seems like that was a kind of don't shit where you sleep Yes Well, like this must be based in russia and alpha o2 would even sign off his messages with a russian sign off like be saved brothers but written in cyrillic

russian so there was this fear that oh this guy is what if he is in russia and the site is hosted in russia and will never be able to reach past that kind of as you said like geopolitical boundary does russia ever well not now obviously given everything that's going on but prior to invading ukraine do those conversations at least happen though like is it possible that if if someone's caught on either end us or russia that we have examples of where people did get sent from one to the other? I think like there was a period, I think, when there was cooperation. And then my friend Patrick Howell O'Neill wrote a great piece, I think, for MIT Tech Review about a case where maybe the first case where it kind of all fell apart and like

the American, probably I think the FBI. Sorry, this is not my story. But I identified these like notorious Russian cyber criminals and we're trying to get the Russians to cooperate in extraditing them. Oh my god. What's this called? Operation – this is like 2011, 2012, 2013, something like that. I can't remember the dates. This was the thing where John got caught for the final time because there was a joint – and we were laughing because this would never happen today.

But there was a joint operation, FSB, FBI, somebody else, and they were taking down specifically like the international carding industry i'm not sure if this is if it's the same case it could be it could be but the the uh in this story at least this is one where it seemed like the fsb was cooperating and then they essentially let the cyber criminals like get get away from right under their noses and the americans had like gone as far as traveling to Russia to get these guys. And in some ways, put the nail in the coffin of any notion of cooperation with Russian law enforcement.

But that's a historical story that I didn't tell. And everybody should check out Patrick Howell O'Neill's story. Patrick Howell O'Neill. Where did you say he wrote that again? I think it was MIT Tech Review. O'Neill, MIT Tech Review, Russia, U.S. carding. Let's see if we can pull it up. I'm not sure it was carding.

It may have been like a different kind of hacking. Yeah, I can't find it right now. So we'll have to look that up later. I can send you a link. You can put in the notes or whatever you'd like. Yeah, please. That'd be great. But yeah, there was this notion that Alpha O2, guy must be russian and therefore we'll never get him and uh you know

people like talked about him as like this one prosecutor described him his his like the impression of alpha o2 at the time as like the michael jordan of the dark web like what if this guy is just so smart and so careful that we just will never catch up with him. And it was around that time that they got their first real tip that was kind of the beginning of that AlphaBay case. And how did that happen? What was the tip? Yeah, so it was very much like what happened to Ross Ulbricht in a way. In the very first days that AlphaBay was online, it turned out, 2014 as you just looked up,

years earlier, before anybody really cared about Alphabay, because it was just one of many of these dark web sites, if you signed up for the user forum on Alphabay, you would get a welcome email. And that welcome email's metadata included this email address that it should not have included, which was pimpalax91 and hotmail.com. And some tipster, some some like dark web sleuth had signed up in those first days before this

thing was fixed, and it was fixed very quickly. And just kept that email for years as Alpha Bay grew into the biggest dark web market ever. then just before thanksgiving of 2016 tipped off the the dea um sent this tip to like of all places like a dea agent in fresno voluntarily yeah i mean i i i don't know who the tipster is. I've never – that's been very carefully kept from me. I think that, of course, law enforcement agencies don't want to reveal the identities of anonymous tipsters. But yeah, I don't know what that person's motivation was. But that was the first kind of crack.

And that was the guy Robert Miller He sent that to in Fresno right? I mean the rubber Miller is also a pseudonym for a DEA agent Who didn't want me to use okay? Yeah, I'll call him Robert Miller and He had done some sort of like pretty rudimentary dark web cases where he busted some dealers essentially Fresno the Fresno office of the dea and and the prosecutor there had like a dark web task force and they had done some pretty clever but small-scale things like uh using mistakes that dealers had made to identify them and like then tracking them down and but they weren't they never expected that they would be the ones to go after the kingpin of alpha bay um and but as they like like kind of scoured the web

with this email address that they now had pimpalex91 at hotmail.com they began to find this you know the this trail that alexander cause had left left. He had used this email address, for instance, on like a Canadian social media site. And they could see that he had been this like hip hop sort of wannabe as a teenager. He was from French Canada, from Quebec. And then they followed it further. They found his LinkedIn page where they could see that he'd kind of cleaned up, become a web developer, had his own web development company, a front company.

Eventually that would be revealed. And then they found his fiance's social media and saw that he actually now lived in Bangkok, had a Lamborghini Aventador, seemed to own a villa in phuket he owned several places right i think eventually they tracked all of this and they found that he owns like property in antigua barbuda and like granada and cyprus i mean he was not like ross olbrich no he was he was enjoying like his dark web like profits in a way that ross alricht never did. But even then, like they did not, they weren't, I mean, yes, like a web developer, like owning a Lamborghini is not like expected, you know, that's, that seems suspicious. And they had this email address. But even so, like they wondered, like, could they were they being set up like, they had to ask themselves, the agents and prosecutors in Fresno, what if this tipster has even set us up?

What if cause is being framed to take the fall for Alpha O2? Yeah, because it's kind of, that was the thing about this. It was almost strikingly easy to get there. Exactly. And often when something is that easy like it does seem like it must be a setup I think that they felt that too and so that's that is when cryptocurrency becomes part of the story again and it actually was happening like in a totally different thread in a different place like the Fresno office had no idea how to trace cryptocurrency in that way but at the same

time as they were chasing this like too good to be true kind of lead uh it happened that these two fbi analysts in washington dc who asked me to call them just ali and a, not no last names, were also trying to find the kingpin of Alphabay and using cryptocurrency tracing. And Chainalysis too, of course, like by this point, every Chainalysis customer is like asking them, can you help us to at least like chart out what part of the blockchain is being used what belongs to alpha bay like uh which of these millions and hundreds of millions of addresses at this point are alpha bay addresses and um analysis was like devoting years of work to this they this was not easy like alpha bay had learned from the silk road like the in many ways that the silk road would like take everybody's transactions like mine and that

experiment that i did and pull them together into like a few addresses so that made it easy using like the same multi-input transaction trick that sarah micklejohn came up with you could see that all those addresses must belong to the silk road butabay never did that. And in fact, Alphabay advertised to its users that it very cleverly tumbled and mixed their coins. And actually, the real trick was that it kept them all in these distributed addresses, never pooling them into one big account. And that made it very difficult to say that any particular address was an Alphabay address. So they were hypothetically, at first glance, you here finding a way around that those tracing methods right i mean the cat and mouse game had advanced for sure and chain analysis

had to spend like years trying to figure out like what the fingerprints of alpha bay were on the blockchain and never told me actually even what most of those were but they gave me like a an example which was that alpha bay uh essentially like had a fee structure when you send bitcoins you can like pay a fee and the bigger the fee the faster your transaction is confirmed by the whole bitcoin network and alpha bay it turned out had this particular fee structure where like the bigger the payment you were making whatever drug deal you were doing um the bigger the fee was and this was a particular like sliding scale that chain analysis figured out would serve as a kind of fingerprint that they could use to i think probably one of many to to start to like build out the picture of which addresses belonged to AlphaBay and by like late

2016 they had like 2.5 million addresses that they had determined belongs to AlphaBay and when you say belong to AlphaBay well exactly they belong to like buyers or sellers or administrators on AlphaBay and how big was the ecosystem at that point because i know i think it was like within a year alpha bay's daily revenues were higher than silk roads was ever at its peak or something but like how many users did they have roughly you know i don't they buy the numbers that i have in my head are like that by is more like daily transactions. The Silk Road at its peak, I forget exactly how much, was doing like hundreds of thousands, like mid, you know, like three or four hundred thousand, I think, a day in transactions.

By mid 2016, Alphabet surpassed that. And then by mid 2017, they were doing millions of dollars a day. And I do know that by mid-2017 also, flashing, you know, this is like skipping ahead a bit, they had 10 times as many users as the Silk Road had, like registered users. So according to the FBI's numbers anyway. So yeah, this was like a um you know

it it is just like another level of and in fact the arguably the dark web drug trade the dark web black market has never even equaled that sense um kind of depending on like exactly whose measurements and how you measure it um Alpha Bay was truly like a a singularity um but right so I mean if you're picking up where I left off like please Alpha um chain analysis had had figured out the Alpha Bay cluster more or less but then you still have to trace you have to figure out who alpha o2 is within that cluster and then trace out his money to a real person's name and that is what aaron and ali these two fbi analysts figured out how to do and they use so if i remember what you said at first there they figured it out but but they used chain analysis to confirm it all for them or get them all the way. Chain analysis allows you to follow the money, but to figure out whose money to look at, they had to come up with their own clever tricks.

And it was really, I think it was ali's idea um and that was that what if we like look at all of these sums that we know are associated with alpha bay and you remember that i mentioned like one of the earlier markets had pulled off an exit scam where the administrators like run off with everybody's money yes um they realized that whenever an exit scam happens that spooks the whole dark web like everybody pulls out their money from whatever market they're on, because they realize and they're like constantly telling each other everybody in the forums is like, never store more money on the market than you're about

to spend because it can just be taken by the administrator. And the only person who would not be spooked by these exit scams would be an administrator himself like the boss doesn't have to worry about an exit scam he is the one who pulls off the exits right right so what if they thought like what if we look at you know across this all of these addresses and find like a cluster within the cluster of like a large amount of money that sat unmoved even as exit scams occurred and we just start looking at those and soon they they did find a cluster that seemed like really suspiciously large had sat unmoved for you know during exit scams and then they started to trace that the tendrils

of that money to see where it might hit an exchange and they actually got as far as like tracing it to an exchange before they got they heard the tip that Alexander cause was the suspect for alpha o2 hmm and it was after these they had sent out the subpoena they heard Alexander causes name and through their grapevine through their own grapevine through law enforcement and only after that did they get back the results of this subpoena which revealed that it was alexander cause that they cashed out that money that their technique had worked and that they essentially confirmed alpha o2 is this guy alexander cause this like lamborghini driving uh french canadian eccentric dude in in in Bangkok yeah so he's in a foreign

nation would did Bangkok have extradition stuff with very much so it turns out yeah like I think Alexander cause like probably I don't know why he went to Bangkok really maybe just because it's nice there but like he it was the opposite of it turns out like the non-extradition Treaty Russian Haven that they thought he was in Bangkok it turns out is like uh very friendly with the DEA and they have they have a lot of people on the ground there yes very much so and like in the DEA office in Bangkok, I would learn when I visited even was is like the the center for all East Asian operations for the DEA, which has more, I think more foreign agents than any other US law enforcement agency. The DEA has like a huge presence abroad, but it's but in particular in Bangkok. What about do other agencies share a similar presence in bangkok as the dea i'm not sure but like the the what i learned just by you know um this like little capsule history when i talked to the agents there and visited for the you know when i was reporting all this out is that that golden

triangle of i think it's like what is it uh thailand and myanmar and maybe china southern china had become this source of heroin that was that actually we we all like i think have heard of vietnam vets who became addicted to heroin yes many cases that like white china heroin was coming from the golden triangle vietnam vietnam veterans would get addicted during wartime in the 60s and 70s and and so before the dea it was even created this um i forget what the precursor like the earlier agency that would become the dea was called they focused on bangkok because that was where a lot of this heroin that was addicting getting Americans addicted was coming from so that was like one of their first

priorities as an agency I just you know kind of learned this like from just as I like dug a little bit into the history there but yeah and they were smuggling it out too that was the other problem that's how Frank Lucas filled all the streets in New York with with heroin he was bringing it in i believe it was in like caskets that's right that's right from vietnam yeah i've forgotten that story but definitely like this white china like this this golden triangle region was a huge source i think of like more than half of all opiates at the time i think it was then surpassed you know by like afghanistan and whatever nonetheless, like, cause was in the wrong place. Like this was the opposite of a non extradition country. But it was still like, he was a very like

smart guy. And the story I tell in the book, like, it's, it's, it's one of the like, more detailed cases, because he took really smart security measures he was he knew better than to I mean you could tell that Alpha Bay was better at like obfuscating his cryptocurrency despite the fact that that was still used to confirm his identity but then also he had learned from like the from Ross Ulbricht you don't work on your laptop in a public place and he had full disc encryption on his laptop but never even opened it outside of his home so that was like a huge challenge in trying to take him down that would be that eventually like led to this incredibly elaborate sting operation where they knew that

they had to not only grab his laptop but grab it in an open state in his home in his home yeah wow so how did so when was it aaron and who was the other side aaron yes ali and aaron at the fbi so when they traced it back to him and then they confirmed that on another investigation out of fresno dude with the dea due to a tip-off they also had traced it back to him. Obviously, now they know they have their boogeyman, quote-unquote, who's Alpha-02. This is what? Like, end of 2016-ish? Something like that? Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, how long

until they had to do the sting and, like, what was the planning? Like, what was the full story there? Like, how did that go down? Well, I should say that even in the midst of this, there was this other case that Fresno and DC, those two branches like did kind of join forces. But then, at the same time, in this case is so like epic, and it's kind of global scope,

but the Dutch agents were tracking the second biggest dark web market ever used cryptocurrency tracing to find the servers of that market which was called hansa and hatched this idea i mean the dutch are like in truly like very aggressive in their law enforcement's uh operations like this they came up with a plan to not just take down the second biggest dark web market but to take it over to run it themselves undercover and when they found out that the americans were going after the biggest dark web market alpha bay they essentially proposed that they joined forces and create this one-two punch this incredibly like uh ambitious thing where they would take down together take down Alpha Bay the biggest dark web market and then secretly control the second biggest market so that all of the refugees from Alpha Bay would flow into hansa oh they get like a net on the back

end while it was under their control and they would be able to surveil and identify all of AlphaBase users on Hansa, the second biggest market that they were secretly controlling. So this plan took a little while to coordinate and hatch. But then there's still, as I was saying, the challenge was how do they get cause, like how cause the AlphaO2 and catch him red-handed in the same way that ross ulbricht was and one of the the tactics that really allowed them to do this was that they figured out that cause had a third alter ego as a kind on this kind of pickup artist alpha male forum where he was known as romeo he was like a fan of raw dogging and that was unfortunate

excuse me for like explaining all this but no you can say it's a rated r show you can say what you want that's funny and he was like pro like just absolutely live blogging his sex life on this on this like alpha male pretty gross forum how'd they figure out that was him you know it's interesting um i don't actually know how they initially i mean this romeo character this other pseudonym was like sort of bragging about his like living large in bangkok having a lot of cryptocurrency having a web development firm which was the front company so there you go all these like things kind of pointed to him but then as always it's about following the money in this case he um it turns out that cause was paying for a uh premium account

on rush v and they so they subpoenaed his paypal account found that he was paying for a uh premium account on rush v and they so they subpoenaed his paypal account found that he was paying for this account and that romeo alpha o2 alexander cause they're all one person and that actually aside from just like you know the fascination of like law enforcement agents at the dea and fbi like pouring over over the details of this guy's sex life. And also, he brags, as Romeo, about his laptop encryption and how he, like, you know, has done this as, like,

his perfect OPSEC operational security. But then also, as Romeo, you could see when he was online because Roosh V, this forum, has, like, an icon next to every username. And it's, you know, if it's's green that means they're active at that moment so the DEA actually was like a DEA agent in Bangkok figured this out she was became Jen Sanchez exactly Jen Sanchez who was like the the kind of most like I don't know most deeply involves uh age in Bangkok, perhaps. Her

boss will Guzman was like part of the case as well. But she was the one who figured out if that you can see when he's online. And that means you can see when his laptop is open. It turns out so that was a huge I mean, this like, you know, I think that cause probably the Dread Pirate Roberts had like this public persona. He loved to to spout all this political philosophy and stuff and sort of soak up the adulation of the silk road community but cause was not like that with alpha bay he was very much like all business with his drug market

so i think he needed an outlet to sort of like show off and and that was unfortunately for him like this essentially like a sex forum where he just bragged about all the all of the thai women that he was picking up at his lamborghini and sleeping with like on uh in these extramarital affairs always comes back to the pride man some way or another comes back to pride and hubris is like the downfall of all of these guys and alpha o2 was so careful but romeo was like not you know his other alter ego was where he he truly kind of uh got caught in a sense because that allowed them to trace his movements. They could see that he would basically follow him physically, see that he would pick up somebody in his Lamborghini

and take them to his second home or to a love motel. And then they would see him live blogging the sex that he'd had the next day. So that allowed them to hatch this plan that uh involves like half a dozen undercover agents many most of whom were thai the thai police and the thais like equivalent of the dea was hugely involved in this too um so on july 5th of 2017 they assembled this whole kind of undercover operation with somebody pretending to be a gardener somebody pretending to be like an electrician working on a telephone pole and then an american dea agents the one uh will guzman who i just mentioned was pretending to be

like shopping for real estate with his thai wife at the house next door all of this and then this this other couple two women undercover thai female agents who were uh pretending to be like just having taken a wrong turn down to the cul-de-sac where kaza's house was i mean all this is happening at the same time it's kind kind of ridiculous. They drive this Toyota Camry down to cul de sac, and then pretend that they're lost and are trying to turn around and then crash the their Camry into causes front gate, which is all ruse designed to get his attention to pull him out of his house, and hopefully

get him to leave his laptop open. And they do this, of course, when they can see that green icon on the roof fee is active like they know he's long he's that he's there um but at the same time by the way I didn't even tell this like branch of the investigation but they had to identify the Alpha base server which they did this is actually tigering Chainalysis who did this. Back at the IRS. Yes, exactly. Who came up with this still secret technique to identify the Alphabet server, which they are now trying to access an image. Maybe we can come back to the technique

they used. But however they did it, they found that it was in Lithuania, they have agents in Lithuania at the same time, who can see that causes logged in to the server, and then accidentally pull it off, they actually accidentally crashed the server as they're like examining it. And this is prior, obviously, this happens just minutes before the whole sting that they're planning did that wait wait were these guys it was was tigran and chain analysis aware that this thing was going down definitely i mean um because i know they were at a separate organization initially like they um when they found the server when they used the secret technique chain analysis had no idea that the bust was planned for just days uh away okay so by this time uh by july 5th it's all coordinated chain

analysis is no longer involved but they helped to find the ip address of the server so uh so they unintentionally crashed this obviously exactly and and they and they are now thinking oh my god like cause he's gonna know something's up he's just gonna shut his laptop lid and that'll be enough for us to be screwed essentially that hold on real quick though that way that they found in there that secret way that they're not sharing is this another potential government warrantless problem it's a good question um yeah i mean i i spent a lot of the the reporting like of this book trying to figure out that secret technique and i i do explain what i'm pretty sure it was at the end of the book um whether it was illegal like i haven't really so first of all

causes a canadian does that you you know, Kaz is Canadian. He's in Bangkok. The server is in Lithuania. Could they catch him with this? Even if he were American, would he not face that same catch-22 as Ross Ulbricht? Like, he's got to claim it's his server to have any privacy rights to it. I mean, it's a weird, like Paradox that you can catch these people in but also the fact that cause is a Canadian living in Bangkok I'm not sure he has like that the the US

law enforcement has to get a warrant for his server I don't know how that works because then if they try him out of the US though isn't he I don't know um that's a law question legal question it ultimately wouldn't matter for wouldn't matter we'll get to that but um but yeah people can read that in your book that part the the rest yeah that's that's fine i just wanted to know if there was something possibly there it's both like uh it's both like a good i don't know kind of reveal but also um maybe we shouldn't spoil it but it's also like a bit of a technical story so but like i did i think i did figure out what they did and that's the kind of like surprise reveal at the end of the book i actually just in the very last phase of the reporting i think i like did i mentioned a leak from j analysis earlier and that is how i figured

that secret technique out as well but but, they crashed this server right before this is going, minutes before this is supposed to go down. So then everybody, this whole team, and there's like six undercover agents on Kaz's block surrounding his house in different ways. Like the DEA agent and his fake wife are in the house. They're like, they've got eyes on his house as they pretend to shop. Like the DEA agent is like trying to distract the real estate agent while his partner is upstairs, like, you know, doing surveillance on Kaza's home. And then they have a feed of like a real-time video feed

from the DEA agent's car from the Toyota Camry. So there's a whole war room of agents and prosecutors, Americans, who are a few miles away in Bangkok watching all of this unfold. And they're like,

oh shit, the server is down. You need to take him now. And that's when these two agents in the Camry crash it into the Kaza's gate. And that's kind of like the beginning of Camry crash it into Kaza's gate. And that's kind of like the beginning of this very quick succession of events where, first, it didn't work. I mean, Kaza, they could see that he opens the window of his bedroom slightly.

And they're like, oh, we got his attention. Maybe he stepped away from his computer. But it's his wife, who is, by the the way eight months pregnant who comes down and they have to like do this whole pantomime of like the the undercover agent who would crash the car was like oh I'm so sorry can we can we pay for the damage can you please get your husband to come down so I can figure this out with him and and uh and cause does come down in like his gym shorts and shirtless and shoeless and uh they go into the house well at that point the the fake driver for the real estate shopping couple comes out and he kind of like uh i mean it's an elaborate story but like um basically uh he kind of pretends to be helping cause with the gates but then somebody gives a signal and

the guy who was the electrician i believe starts like puts on a police vest and starts like sprinting towards cause to arrest him and at the same moment another agent who was hiding in the back seat of the real estate shopping couple's car comes out um cause as when he sees the the agent running towards him in a police uniform realizes what's going on like tries to spin around he knows he has to get back in the house to his laptop but at that point like two and then three of the agents are like wrestling with him the one who was hidden in the back seat he goes by the nickname M and he kind of breaks free allows the other cops to like wrestle with cause and M just knows that his job is to Sprint into the house through the gate that's been like you know opened yeah up the stairs he's actually like studied the layout of the home i mean this is

all you know very carefully planned and um takes steps two by two he thinks that the computer is going to be in the guest bedroom and he busts into the room it turns out that cause had like guests from canada who were sleeping in there and he wakes them up and he's like oh sorry and he turns around goes into the into the master bedroom and finds that cause his laptop is there and still open and alive logged into alpha bay the whole case is cracked but that's that's causes arrested uh they've got his laptop he like russell bricht even had like a net worth you know spreadsheet on the computer this is like the a different kind of it's like the hubris of full disc encryption you think you can store this yeah do whatever you want yeah

because you're never gonna get it but he got caught the same way pretty much it was just like that much harder because it was in his home you know um but they did get him he's taken to Thai jail essentially he agrees to extradition and then a week after his arrest he's found dead in his jail cell alleged suicide right yeah so of course U.S law enforcement Thai law enforcement say that he committed suicide he he hung himself um his a lot of guys hanging themselves in prison these days his mother his defense attorney of course say that he was killed um what no there's a question what are they what are they getting at are they getting at like okay he was alpha 02 but there's someone behind this whole operation or something. There's governments behind it.

There's boogeymen, whatever. Nobody – I don't think anybody who would claim that Kaz was murdered knows who murdered him or has even like a strong theory but yeah the idea is that what if like maybe thai cops were on the take to protect him once he got caught they killed him to keep him quiet maybe he did have a local partner maybe he was tied up with the mafia i mean i did hear from one of his friends that he was like cashing out bitcoins at one point through the russian mafia in bangkok i don't know i don't know what that means but like um he he you know had like kind of liquidity problem like he had more cryptocurrency than he could deal with obviously that's what got him caught eventually that he was cashing out through exchanges too so um and you know they ultimately trace like

more than a dozen of his exchange accounts and his name and his wife's. But, yeah, maybe he had, like, a local laundering partner, too. Or something like that. And that person had him killed to keep him quiet. Who knows? I also don't know if he was—I'm not claiming—I couldn't figure it out i went as far as like spending hours and hours with all of the thai officials the detectives and the agents and the um you know the people in this agency who like masterminded the operation to get him i even talked to the jailers on duty and i uh and yet

i still don't know the answer to this question they have security footage they do but it's missing about half an hour oh yeah this is the thing and of course his defense attorney says the same thing like you're kidding me like this you've got and i've watched and showed his defense attorney a video of the last minutes of his life where um that the ties shared with me i mean i didn't even know that there was going to be video in his cell but they brought me down to to the jail like when i was interviewing the agents in this dea equivalent office in bangkok the jail is on the first floor they brought me down to the first floor i met the jailers they were like yep he was right here. And I can see the video, the cameras. And so I asked them to share

the video, and they did. Along with, they shared a coroner's report as well. And yet, the video shows him, you know, kind of sitting in his cell. Then you see him go off screen. By way his cell the way that this

happened was that he has his cell has a small internal wall with a bathroom behind it it's like a three-foot high partial wall with a little swinging door and he goes behind that door and I can't you can actually see him just barely sort of messing with the towel somehow which was what was used or what suffocated him and then that clip ends and the next clip is you see Thai police and then Jen Sanchez so we mentioned it was like the the one sight looking at his body yeah running in like in a panic seemingly like looking over this

internal wall in his dead body which has been choked you know choked out by um a towel fashioned into a noose and you know i i truly you're you know i appreciate that you're a skeptic i'm an agnostic on this i don't i did my best to like figure this out and i do not know what happens and i you know his defense attorney also was like well taking a step back even like his like jen sanchez the dea agent who found his dead body it was like i know exactly how he did it he turned this he like tied his towel into a noose uh sort of like got the end of it wedged into the hinge of this three foot high internal door and then you know lean forward to cut off his his air supply um the defense attorney is like that's impossible nobody can can suffocate that way he's not even his body is not even suspended

he's only this is a noose that's three feet off the ground then i i actually like did a lot of really gross uh grizzly research into house you know these kind of uh auto um in many cases like the research is based on like accidental deaths from autoerotic asphyxiation and it very often happens with bodies that are not fully suspended i don't want to get into like too much about how to kill yourself but it's like um it's just seemed dangerous to talk about that but yeah but it but suffice to say that i was convinced by like talking to a lot of doctors even about this that that are reading the literature and like um that it is possible to to kill yourself this way the fact that he was going in there and it appears based on the tape that he was playing with the

towel and we have that on video makes this sound a little less suspicious and like he legitimately did but i mean who do i gotta fuck to make sure that when someone kills themselves in prison that doesn't happen to be the 15 minutes where the camera's not working. I know. And it's so... It's like, Thailand is not a country where police are held accountable. So I can kind of imagine,

and this is what I was told, essentially, that the video shows Ka's messing with the towel, going to the back of his cell where he's hidden. And then the next action is people running in to find his body. And between those two moments,

there's about half an hour where nothing happens. And the Thais say that they just deleted that because it shows nothing. So, I mean, I think Americans hopefully would know better than to delete the evidence that, like... Apparently not. Well, yeah, exactly. But that's a different story. It's a different story. A very different story. So, I don't know. I don't know what to believe. But I do, I don't want to, like, attribute to malice what might have been, like, ridiculous incompetence.

Yeah, yeah. It could be open-ended. Sure. And that's where I where i you know i left it myself um but that ended the case because they had alpha too like what happened because he did he did have other people on the site similarly to silk road who at least like reported to him right they have alpha two they took down alpha bay um and at this point they had as i said like taken over the second biggest dark web market ever. So they sent everyone there, the Danish one. And just as they planned, like, it worked, like, beautifully for law enforcement anyway, that thousands and thousands of refugees from Alpha Bay flooded into Hansa, the second biggest dark web market, not knowing what had happened.

It was all kept secret i mean it was a full i think like days before even it was clear that um alpha bay had been uh taken down by law enforcement people thought it might be an exit scam people thought it might just be downtime you know that happens with websites on the dark web in particular and so they all flooded into hansa and registered there and hansa had been turned into this just like absolute surveillance death trap for its users because it was completely top to bottom now controlled by dutch police who were pretending who had taken the roles of the administrators and they proceeded to just like, do every evil trick they could think of. They had all of these users under their control. It was like, such a rare situation. And they

really did do everything they could think of to, you know, you're not supposed to be identifiable when you visit a dark website, even for the dark web administrators themselves. But if you turn that dark website into a trap, and like, change its code, yeah, they can they hold the keys, they can do what they want, then you can start to set these traps for people. And that's what they did. I mean, they, they did things like you when you make a dark web drug deal you were supposed to encrypt your address but by this point dark websites had features that would automatically in theory encrypt your address for you but hansel had been like recoded so that it would record your address before it encrypted of course and so they got everybody they got it they had them all right uh and they they even like did a thing where they tricked all the dealers on the site into downloading this file

Where there was like an icon? The Hansa icon Was loaded by pulling the image from a server under Dutch control So they that would like essentially reveal the IP address of everybody who opened that file like a kind of you know beacon trojan horse wait does that get their ip address even if they're using tor well that's the thing like they would be using tor to visit hansa but then they'd load this they load this file on their computer and that pulls in the image not over tor and therefore it reveals them so they got like you know dozens and dozens of the biggest dealers on Hansa who were coming from AlphaBay exactly this way.

They also did a thing where they tricked everybody into uploading new images to the site of their drugs that they were selling, and there was supposed to be an automatic way of stripping out the metadata that includes the location sometimes of a photo and instead they of course recorded that metadata so they like all of these different tricks were used to identify the dealers and over the next i mean it's not did they extradite all these guys to the u.s all the dealers yeah it's not really clear exactly like what the like how uh that all of that data which was collected essentially by Europol

um the Dutch police collected this data then handed it over to Europol and it gets like fed into like U.S systems as well and then it's just like a a you know this is such a global operation there were then like three different major busts of dark web drug dealers over the subsequent years with like all these different code names like i forget what they were all called like saboteur they all have like tor in in their you know clever um names and hundreds and hundreds of dealers were arrested in these so it's not they i think that they almost probably purposely obfuscated which ones were identified through the hansa operation versus other techniques but

suffice to say that like there were there was you know an enormous uh number of takedowns that followed around the world i mean a lot of these people were not extradited they were prosecuted in their own countries too um just a massive success for multiple governments though it was i mean it was also just like the biggest psyop ever performed against the dark web because that we know of but yeah sure yeah I mean um against in particular the the drug part of the dark web markets um because it was like you cannot even trust the people in charge of these dark web markets like even the the like dread pirate roberts of whatever hansa himself might be working might be a dutch police officer and uh that

instilled a lot of fear it took like a very long time for the dark web markets to recover from all of that chaos and paranoia see we know about like you know that for example the dirty dea cop from and the dirty secret service cop force and bridges from the silk road case like there's some that obviously become a part of the story but i'm always curious with all these sites how many people were unknowingly doing it on behalf of an organization like i will tell you one place my head goes with like Alpha O2 is that he was an agent for somebody doing something. Like it's very – it's possible at least. Certainly. I mean I talked to the prosecutors and all the agents who led that case, and I don't know. I spent enough time with them that I don't believe they're lying

when they say that they actually intended to extradite Kaz to the U.S. and flip him if they could. They were going to actually, they wanted to turn Alpha Bay, or, you know, at least probably take, they had already taken down Alpha Bay, but to turn Alpha O2 into an incredible informant and use that to, you know, do other kind of like stings and traps. But he was dead. And they really saw that as a huge disappointment.

I mean, I don't know if Kaz was killed or who would have killed him, but I don't believe actually that the U.S. DEA and prosecutors and FBI and IRS, like tigre and gabarian any of them would have wanted him dead they wanted him on team usa as they say that actually makes sense so it could have been with someone else but you're absolutely right that like they they wanted him to be the kind of asset that you're talking about but unfortunately for everyone uh he died yeah and so as you say like you know was there something extra that was not legal about like the way that they got to his server maybe that might have come up at trial but he never had a trial he was dead that's just the and and it's one of those it's like we're never gonna know now because like you can't talk to a dead guy but that was a crazy takedown they had

and everything and and one of the things from your book we're not really going to get deep into today because we're coming up on the end here but another one that was a huge standout in there was the whole case against like the i forget what the new term is for now but the term child sexual abuse materials yeah so what we know is child porn when they talk about it in in the media but they were able to use very short long story short here they were able to use cryptocurrency tracing techniques to be able to get these guys including you you open your book with a with an example of of a teacher in atlanta georgia who was vice principal who was caught using this method essentially looking he had collections of child porn absolutely i mean yeah i mean he actually was later charged that rats too yeah that vice principal was charged with actual abuse of kids in his school and this

case which again this is tigran gambarian at the irs who on his way home from bangkok like calls up chain analysis to see like do they have any new leads analysis tips them off to this site called welcome to video which would turn out to be not only the biggest child sexual abuse video market on the dark web but also one that that actually uses cryptocurrency which is pretty which is unusual actually usually these sites kind of trade people trade videos essentially and that allowed them irs and chain analysis to trace out the entire network and i know we're coming up to the end so i'll just summarize that they they arrested 337 uploaders, downloaders, abusers of children around the world and rescued 23 kids.

I don't know the details of those. They wouldn't tell me, of course, for the sake of the victims, most of those stories. I tell one story in the book. But that's like a – there's no – that is in some ways like the incredible proof of the power of this technique that they were able to, with cryptocurrency tracing alone in almost every case, identify all of these pretty abhorrent individuals. Well, that's great that they were able to do that with that. That's just – I don't – Well, it's true. That's one of those I that with that that's just I I don't well it's it's true that's one of those I just can't fathom I don't know it's it is there's of course I wasn't I didn't want to and could not legally look at the materials but on this site and it was taken down but I talked to all of you I mean IRS agents are not equipped either to like look at this stuff but they had to t green and kambarian and his partner in that case

uh Christian Chesky they were thrown into the deep end like these are financial investigators who have never looked at this stuff before and has no idea what they were getting into and were traumatized I mean like I can't even imagine I can't even imagine it's definitely like a part of even as I have covered this stuff for this world of hackers and the dark web for 15 years or whatever and i have never i've always kind of like averted my gaze from that world and uh because it's just so dark it's like a part the darker part of the dark web than i have ever wanted to even tell the story of and just had to here but it's also has a happy ending and it's like an incredible kind of climax to this series of cases yeah yeah and

it's I'm glad you told that story too because it's you know it luckily most of us can't fathom that world but it's not two people in it that's the really scary thing there are there are a lot of people around the world who are in that kind of shit and the internet has provided an unfortunate safe haven for them to be able to engage in this in a way that the world has never seen and so you know any way that that can be caught in in this way if it's done through cryptocurrency sounds great to me i mean it's it's it's a it it It absolutely is. It's like totally unambiguously a righteous takedown, that one. But then I do kind of like try in the book too

to even after all of that to ask the question, is this actually a good thing for the world? That it turned out that what was supposed to be almost like an escape valve from financial surveillance turned out to be the opposite like uh financial surveillance is just so pervasive it's so hard to use money privately and bitcoin was meant to offer that and instead it's served as a trap for everybody whether they are like child abusers or whether they're like dissidents or activists or people yeah trying to might not be the worst exactly people who actually might need privacy um you know there's just always two sides to this it's like hard to see that other side once you've seen

the the incredibly like truly evil ways that this technology was people were trying to use it but then there are like legitimate reasons to try to keep your money private and it's it's it's not an entirely good feeling to come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is not that it's the opposite of it well maybe the the only appropriate last question is for you just having done not only all the work on this book but having lived among this world and reported in it for now over a decade. Where do you see – obviously like we're talking when there's an enormous bear market and we just had the whole FTX blow up and all that. It's a whole separate conversation. But where do you see cryptocurrency going do you think there's something else that'll come up to replace it or do you think that the

ecosystem we've seen get built will eventually become a monetary system well i think that like i don't know there there are maybe like three different branches of of like where things are going there's the kind of civilized like cryptocurrency has mostly become very civilized like it's become very legitimate and this notion that it's like a tool for crime all money is i mean it's a smaller and smaller percentage of all cryptocurrencies used for crime but actually a larger and larger absolute amount of cryptocurrency is involved in crime. It's still growing in that sense. But that's the kind of second fork that I'm talking about,

which is that largely that is happening thanks to like Russian cyber criminals, untouchable people in Russia or North Korea who can be traced but can't be stopped, you know? And then there is this third very interesting thing that's happening, I think worth mentioning, which is something like Zcash. The dream of the cypherpunks, where we started this whole conversation, is still alive of what if we can still create a technology for truly untraceable payments.

And Zcash may be that. And then we've opened a whole new can of worms, which is a digital cash for the internet whose promises of privacy and untraceability hold up. And then where are we? Then what about those abhorrent markets for child abuse? What about the drug trade? It's going to be gonna be you know it'll be good for privacy it'll be it'll be i don't know very dangerous in other ways and that world has

never existed and you know it's a we're just like on the edge of a very uh unknowable future well there are good and bad people in the world and there always will be and it's some of it's really heavy to think about because if you could wave a wand just make everyone good obviously if you're a good person you would but there there are questions certainly to ask as far as like what what is the biggest net good you know is the is the biggest net good not necessarily on the side of the government being able to trace where every single thing goes especially with a digital footprint in a new world could be that's on the other side of that and the other side of that holds bad because

then when you give privacy bad people do bad things i i i don't know that's why i'm not paid to give those answers and everything but it's – your book comes at a really good time because as we move into this totally interconnected globally internet world that we have now officially gone into but it gets more and more iterated over time, you know, these are questions that we got to ask. And these are these are things that people got to become aware of. Because when when things like money and your footprint, your digital footprint became become the center of your ability to be a citizen in the world, that's where shit can get real scary. So I like the I like the pathway you're on here. But again, you've kind of been on this since the beginning, almost like you were at the earliest stages of this, and you're growing with it, and your stories are growing with it. And so as I've always said, I recommend your books heavily. You have – what is it, three now?

Yeah, this is the third one. This is the third one, and this one is called Tracers in the Dark. Once again, you can hit that link in the description to get it off Amazon. Highly recommend. I'm like two-thirds of the way through it. I think it's phenomenal so far. But your last one we talked about in our last podcast number 99 that's sandworm talked a bunch about that what was the name of the first one

about Julian Assange and the cypherpunks again yeah it was called this machine kill secrets which is like a reference to WikiLeaks right which is sort of like another thing that came out of the cypherpunks but then yeah in the midst of that book I came across cryptocurrency and I've wanted to write a book about it ever since i just didn't ever expect it would be this story but it did and we talked about that one a bunch as well on the last podcast so again i'd really recommend that but listen thank you so much for coming back down here do this did a great job this this story is awesome again i highly recommend it and i'm looking forward to seeing where the where the reporting takes you next well it's always a great conversation i really appreciate it julian

of course all right everybody else you know what it is give me give it a thought get back to me peace