The facts are there, and when they talk about the same cases, they align nicely.
Andy Greenberg's Tracers makes those cases stories about people, while Carlisle portrays facts without character development which I would not have realized was necessary or useful in a book on Money Laundering had I not read Tracers first.
Where this book is great, and it is far superior to Tracers as an educational resource in this regard, is how money-laundering works in Crypto.
Mixers and Coinswaps are explained well, with several of the related cases such as Helix and Bitcoin Fog, being explained.
The importance of regulation and how regulators have followed behind crypto developments is a major theme of the book.
From regulating exchanges, to Bitcoin ATMs, to privacy wallets such as Wasabi Wallet, and the debate on whether privacy wallets can or should be regulated.
The attempts of FinCEN to introduce further regulations and the Astroturfed outcry against them is especially interesting.
A nice coverage of the history of crypto sanctions by OFAC is also portrayed, from Suex, Chatex, Garantex, Bitzlato, and IRGC-related ransomware.
A history of the evolution of ransomware, which would not be possible without those unidentified and unaccounted for large currency transactions that cryptocurrency has enabled.
One example of sanctioning crypto was the OFAC sanctions against Lazarus Group Ethereum addresses, sanctioned along with one of their chosen Mixers, Blender.io.
The latter part of the book does a nice job explaining the way Ethereum opened up a number of possibilities with Smart Contracts.
Carlisle does a great job explaining Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens and how DAOs, DEXs, and DApps are built using the Smart Contracts of Ethereum with more on the DeFi system including how Bridges work.
The Bitfinex hack, which opens the book, focused on 94,643.
29 BTC from 2016 sitting under a microscope, untouched for six years, until it moved in Feb 2022 leading to the arrest of Dutch and Razzlekhan with $3.5 Billion seized, felt like it was set up as the climax of the book as we returned to the story from the opening chapter.
The intermediary chapters helped us understand the now-revealed mechanisms, but again, it was facts without characters, which is fine - I just got ruined by the engagement of Tracers.
The final chapter seems like something the Elliptic marketing department forced on him.
Fantastic content - even possibly as an accompanying text for a crypto crime course at a university especially with the rich depth of referenced articles, policies, and cases.
This Cyber News was published on garwarner.blogspot.com. Publication date: Sat, 20 Jan 2024 15:13:04 +0000