Journalist Andy Greenberg is no stranger to the murky world of cryptocurrency. The senior writer for WIRED and longtime cybersecurity journalist was one of the last reporters to interact with pseudonymous Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto before they evidently ceased communications. In his new book, “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency,” Andy follows the gripping story of IRS special agent Tigran Gambaryan as he follows the money to zero in on some of the most mysterious and monstrous criminals in the cyber underground.
Journalist Andy Greenberg is no stranger to the murky world of cryptocurrency. The senior writer for WIRED and longtime cybersecurity journalist was one of the last reporters to interact with pseudonymous Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto before they evidently ceased communications.
In his new book, “Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency,” Andy follows the gripping story of IRS special agent Tigran Gambaryan as he follows the money to zero in on some of the most mysterious and monstrous criminals in the cyber underground.
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Don’t miss the inaugural episode of WE’RE IN! Season 2 to hear more from Andy on:
* How Tigran joined forces with expert investigators and cryptographers to jettison misconceptions about the anonymity of major cryptocurrencies, exposing alleged criminal masterminds in the process
* The genesis of successful crypto tracing and analysis firms like Chainalysis
* The twisted motivations of those who founded infamous dark web emporiums like AlphaBay and Silk Road
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Bella: [00:00:00] So first of all, Andy, super, super excited to talk with you today. Thank you so much for joining us
Andy: Thank you for having me
Bella: Uh, so first of all I just wanna say I have been super excited about your new book. I really like the title. Um, and I, I haven't finished it, but I'm in the first section.
I'm like mostly done with the first section and I was immediately hooked. Like it is exciting right off the bat. Uh, and so for listeners who maybe are new to the subject, um, I'm wondering if you can tell us what is the biggest misconception about cryptocurrency?
Andy: Well, you know, the, the whole notion of this book really is that when I first discovered for myself this phenomenon called Bitcoin in 2011, um, you know, I was among the many people who believed that what was special about this was that it was an anonymous untraceable currency for the internet.
That, you know, you know, even Satoshi Naka. Himself or herself, uh, had written in an email introducing Bitcoin that participants can be anonymous. And I, [00:01:00] I was, you know, among the people who believed that, and I was, I've always been interested as a reporter, as a cybersecurity reporter in, in like the ways that people seek anonymity online for privacy or for, you know, to do bad things and.
That was what interested me about Bitcoin. You know, I, I thought that this might be an untraceable crime coin for the dark web. And then, you know, it was very quickly adopted for that purpose on sites like the Silk Road. And then, you know, now looking back, in fact, I kind of had this kind of slow motion epiphany that, that I only, you know, put that I only kind of like fully realized, uh, in 2020 or so.
Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable, you know, it was in. An extremely traceable form of money, and it served as a kind of trap for almost a full decade. I mean more than a decade in some sense, for people seeking privacy and especially for criminals who thought that they could get away with all sorts of illicit [00:02:00] finance and money laundering and theft and crime and, and massive drug deals among.
Blake: I just absolutely love the book. I, I, I, I think all the incredible detail you captured will be so valuable to readers, uh, just casual readers, new to the subject and experts alike. So, uh, really just kudos for a triumph of reporting. And, um, we'll try to keep this conversation free of any large spoilers, but obviously I expect we'll, um, Unpack a lot of the themes and a few characters and details from the book.
So I just wanted to give a heads up to listeners. You know, there may be a couple of, uh, a couple of little spoilers here just, just as a heads up. But, um, with, with that said, I, I have to ask the, uh, those $40 that you mentioned that you almost spent on Bitcoin way back in the early days, uh, what if Right
Andy: Yeah, it's a painful memory to think of. Like when I, so in 2011 when I was writing, I think it was the first print magazine story about Bitcoin for Forbes Magazine, I thought, Hey, I should just try to buy some Bitcoins to see how these work. And I tried to spend like $40 buying, [00:03:00] uh, Bitcoins at the time when Bitcoin, uh, the exchange rate was a dollar per Bitcoin, I was gonna buy 40 Bitcoins with my $40 and.
The only exchange was Mount Gson. It was kind of buggy. I tried it, it didn't work, and I gave up. And that that, uh, lack of persistence cost me potentially millions of dollars in retrospect.
Bella: I remember distinctly, You know, when I was a bit younger and everyone was talking about cryptocurrency and I had friends who were buying it probably, I mean, not at a good time, right?
It was already getting really big. We were, we all folks my age at least, like missed that early opportunity. Um, but I think about that too. Like what if, and I remember one of the first things that I learned about cryptocurrency was that in order to mine, like Bitcoin for example, the strain on like the compute power that it takes is awful for the environment.
That was like one of the first things that I learned. And sometimes, you know, as a person in the cybersecurity space, I have friends that [00:04:00] ask me like if I ever got into Bitcoin or if I could go back, if I would get into Bitcoin. And I feel like my answer is always no. Like it doesn't seem worth it to me,
But it's always like that question is always something that I think comes up in this Space.
Andy: I could have like probably bought Bitcoin. Not at a dollar, but you know, for a few hundreds of dollars. Although at that point it wasn't clear at all that it was, you know, going to eventually be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Um, but, you know, I always held off in part because I just, I guess a kind of journalistic integrity thing.
Like, I'm gonna keep writing about this. I don't wanna have any feelings about, you know, about like trying to promote Bitcoin because I own a lot of it, or, so I know that was in part why I missed the boat on this. But you know, like I said, it's never. been my interest at Bitcoin has, has investments and the massive appreciation of it that has made it so interesting for most people, um, has sort of been a sideshow for me.
Like I've always been interested in Bitcoin as a tool [00:05:00] for people seeking privacy for good or ill, and particularly for ill, I mean, that's like the most interesting part of the Bitcoin economy to me, and the cryptocurrency economy as a whole has. This, you know, dark web underworld and ransomware and stolen hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in money flowing around.
I mean, that's that I've always found more fascinating than even, um, you know, the get rich quick schemes that I missed in those early days.
Blake: It.
Bella: I think it's interesting hearing you talk about like wanting to, you know, that journalistic perspective, wanting to be sort of hands off because obviously, you know, reading through your part, parts of your book, at least so far, the, the folks that you're writing about were involved in, in Bitcoin in so many different ways.
And I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about one of your sources described as the anthropological side of Bitcoin.
Andy: well, Sarah, Sarah Michell. It's a kind of central [00:06:00] character in the book, and she was a, a university researcher at the University of California San Diego. And in 2013, just at the same time as you know, the Silk Road was really taking off. Um, I had interviewed the dread pirate Roberts, this kind of like a, not this mysterious creator of the Silk Road.
Nobody could figure out who he was. He espoused to me how Bitcoin was untraceable and the perfect, you know, tool for this revolution that he. Creating with the Silk Road. Um, he was a, you know, radical libertarian idealist kind of person. Um, she was looking at, at the Bitcoin economy and at first kind of as you said, looking at it as an anthropologist, trying to figure out, well, what can I actually see if I look at the blockchain?
I mean, maybe this is not as untraceable as people think, and I might be able to just kind of observe how people are using Bitcoin by looking at all this data. I mean, the crazy thing about Bitcoin is. All of the transactions are recorded in the blockchain. Uh, yet, you know, people [00:07:00] like me and even Sotoshi Nakamoto thought that it had privacy properties because the blockchain only records transactions between addresses, not between people who are identified in any way.
Um, but Sarah Michel Jonn started to figure out ways to cluster addresses to figure out when somebody owned lots of addresses, and to tie them all together. And then to even identify, you know, when she, she could figure. Who owned which clusters of addresses and her, her goal as you know, you were getting at, at first was just a kind of anthropology, but then she began, I think, to realize, and this is in the paper that she published that year, that if you were in law enforcement, if you could subpoena like a cryptocurrency exchange for identifying information, you would be really well placed to actually identify tons of people who thought that they were anonymous.
And she published this paper along with her co-authors at U C S D. That was really the first, uh, I would say the first document to explode [00:08:00] that myth of Bitcoin's anonymity or un traceability.
It still didn't get the kind of attention that it ought to have. I mean, um, it would take years longer for people to tru. Uh, digests that and, and understand, no, this is the opposite of untraceable. But that was in, that was a kind of, um, really important historical moment. And a few other characters in the book were really paying attention, including the founders of Chain Analysis, which is now the biggest cryptocurrency tracing company in the world worth 8.6 billion, and people in law enforcement.
Began to wonder like maybe we got, you know, maybe everybody's wrong about this. Maybe we can trace bitcoins and surprise a lot of.
Blake: I remember, you know, back when I was, uh, covering some cybersecurity issues as a reporter for e e news, often framing Bitcoin incorrectly. Really, in retrospect, I would often refer to it in stories as this, you know, very, if not, I wouldn't say impossible to [00:09:00] trace, you know, difficult to trace, un, you know, falling into that sort of untraceable myth.
It's really interesting. but what do you think motivated some of the subjects in your story here? I mean, a lot of these people you mentioned the sort of libertarianism around Dread Pirate Roberts, uh, but then there were others that just kept going even after they'd already collected millions of dollars in illicit gains.
Was it hubris, greed, some combination. What? What was motivating these Characters?
Andy: Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, what motivated the dread pirate Roberts, um, was, by the way Blake, I appreciate that. I wasn't the only journalist who got this wrong, like in the early days. I mean, it's, it was very, um, I mean even after Sarah Michel John's paper, which I covered and I even, you know, had done some.
Some test transactions, I should say, on the Silk Road, buying marijuana there. Uh, Forbes as an experiment, absolutely, as an as an
Blake: Uh, as an experiment, Andy. All right. Okay.
Andy: Uh, she traced, she traced my transactions and nonetheless, like, uh, Sarah, Sarah showed me that she could trace my transactions. [00:10:00] And I still thought, well, you know, if you're a little more careful, if you do the right things, like if you don't make the mistakes I did that you can still be untraceable.
Like it's hard to trace at least. And even that I think was incorrect just to address what you were saying. But yeah, the, the motivations of these dark web kingpins, I mean, It is interesting to see how different they were. I mean, the dread Pirate Roberts, who is really almost just kind of like the character who I used to introduce this world, you know, the book just tells the story of the Silk Road almost as a preamble.
Um, he was very idealistic. He was, um, politically motivated. He thought that he could like bring in this world of, um, I would say like a narco capitalism on the dark web that, you know, Was very short lived for him, at least. He's sadly now like facing a double life sentence in prison. Um, but the people who followed in his footsteps had none of those ideals, I would say.
And the one that I'm most interested in, [00:11:00] uh, and who, who is a major character in the book, uh, is a somebody who went by the name Alpha oh two on the Dark Web and was the founder of Alpha Bay, which was eventually the biggest dark web drug market in. 10 times the size of the Silk Road at its peak. Um, and he sometimes pretended like very briefly to have those libertarian ideals, but then much more clearly was actually just in it for the money.
And Alpha Bay had none of the rules that the Silk Road hat, for instance, about only engaging in victimless crime and none of the. Flowery political rhetoric around it. It was among other things, um, also a, a haven for cyber criminal hackers who were buying and selling huge amounts of stolen credit card data and hacking tools on Alpha Bay, which is actually quite different from the Silk Road and Alpha oh two, the founder of, of the, the site, um, was [00:12:00] himself a kind of notorious Carter, like a credit card fraudster before he created Alpha Bay, which is very different.
Ross Celick, the dread pirate Roberts, who was this, you know, 29 year old idealistic kid in San Francisco, you know?
Bella: we sort of talked about how it took some time for people to kind of like actually accept that, that Bitcoin in particular is like, not anonymous or, or not as anonymous as originally thought.
And like to me, sometimes I feel like reading about what happened with the Silk Road, it feels like, like people were kind of clouded by this, like idealism, right? Like there was like an optimism of this anonymous currency, which made it hard to accept that it might not be.
Uh, but also it sort of sounds like maybe folks were just clouded by. Making money, What do you think about that? I guess.
Andy: it's a common kind of like cycle of hype and gloom around, um, around new technologies and, and like you saw this with Bitcoin, that [00:13:00] everybody wanted to believe in the promise of it. And to, to, you know, it, it was as a gained value.
Everybody wanted to try to like, come up with the reason why it was so special, why, um, everybody should buy into it because there was a sort of profit motive there as well. So I do think people resisted. You know, a lot of Bitcoiners even resisted talking about the, you know, potential flaws in the privacy properties of Bitcoin.
It actually is, I would say, like a, a real drawback to Bitcoin that it's very difficult to hold it even in an anonymous way if you ever want to cash it out or spend it anywhere, uh, or, or buy it from anyone else. That is something that the cryptocurrency community has been trying to solve for years with, you know, tools to work with Bitcoin or upgrades or new cryptocurrencies like Manero and Zcash.
[00:14:00] Um, but it remains that the, you know, the, the, the vast majority of these, these really valuable cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are quite traceable. And that's something that, uh, has taken the whole economy along that economy a long time to kind of come to grip.
Blake: So at, at some points in the book, it takes some really, really dark turns and, and so dark in fact that you opt to warn readers up front about what they're getting into. Uh, can you talk a bit about how you navigated reporting on such disturbing topics and were there any points where you just wanted to.
Stop an interview or just even go rinse your eyes and ears out with Soap.
Andy: I think what you're getting at is this major case that followed Alpha Bay. I mean, I think it's not a spoiler to say that
Blake: Sure.
Andy: Alpha Bay, alpha Bay was eventually largely through cryptocurrency tracing, busted in this massively elaborate sting operation that, I don't know, readers can, I'll [00:15:00] leave that for the book.
But,
Blake: It was very pulse pounding. I will say reading that section, I was like, I, it was, it was a page turner. It really was.
Andy: Thank you. I mean, just to say like, I have tried to tell this, that story of the, the hunt for and take down of Alpha Bay, um, alpha Bay's administrator Alpha to. and actually this sort of like even larger busts in what's the second biggest dark web market was taken over and run undercover at the same time as Alpha Bay was taken down.
And anyway, I'll, I'll leave it for the book, but that was a story that I had been trying to tell for five years and um, I just, it only kind of just reached the point in the last couple of years where the people involved were willing to really tell it in detail.
Blake: I, I almost had a heart attack when there was a moment of a spilled soda, uh, that
Andy: Oh, good. Good. Yeah. Um, well anyway, so the, but that's the alphabet case and then the one that followed is the one that I think you're referring to, which was the welcome to video case. And in some ways, you know, despite the size of alphabet, this [00:16:00] welcome to video case was even more impactful because it was, this was not a drug market or a hacker black market.
This was a, a market for child, sexual child sexual abuse materials, like videos of. Sexual abuse, um, which, uh, was a, a world that I had never really covered. And that I think, you know, I don't know, just I, at least as a reporter, have always sort of almost wanted to avert my gaze from that whole part of the internet.
It's, we all know it exists. Um, I, I think that like, it's so abhorrent and so disturbing. Um, you don't want to even report on it. In some cases, it's just, uh, and people don't want to talk about it. Readers don't wanna read those stories. Uh, I've found. Um, but you know, for whatever, I [00:17:00] couldn't help but tell this story, which followed Alpha Bay in which some of the same investigators through cryptocurrency tracing alone, I mean, this was a case where, because hundreds and hundreds of.
Uh, uploaders, downloaders, actual abusers of children in many cases were paying in Bitcoin. Um, and the administrator was cashing out bitcoins. They could all be traced and hundreds of these men, and they were almost all men, and of course, were arrested in like a dozen countries around the. 23 children were rescued.
Um, and it was all almost exclusively through cryptocurrency tracing that it was possible. Um, so it's truly a landmark case. It's one, yeah. As you said, it was not fun to report on. I mean, the, I am legally prevented, of course, you know, as is anybody who's not in law enforcement from looking even at like images of [00:18:00] this site, which has now of course been taken down.
But, um, I was, but I did spend, you know, hours and hours and hours talking to the investigators who did that case. And were just deep in that hellish environment of having to watch these videos. And in some cases they watch them not only to kind of like, you know, write. Criminal indictments, but to look for clues to try to identify kids.
And they did, I mean, in some cases they, like a tiny clue would allow them to find a kid and rescue them or identify one of their perpetrators. If they, for instance, had not paid in in any cryptocurrency, they, and they couldn't be traced in one case. That led to an actual perpetrator who was doing, you know, I should say alleged I guess, but hands on abuse,
so yeah, I, I did, you know, part of what was fascinating about that case and a theme of the book in general is that many of the major, some, [00:19:00] the main characters of this book, I would say are IRS criminal investigators. They're like accountants essentially. And they had never encountered this world any more than I had.
You know, they, they. Um, people who followed financial crimes. So it was a totally new thing for them to be looking at this kind of child abuse, child exploitation case, and they were fully unprepared for it. And I tried to tell the story in the book of like what that meant for them emotionally. And, uh, they, they are, despite being like accountants and IRS agents, also law enforcement agents, and it was difficult in some cases to get them.
You know, to get past their kind of like, tough exterior. But, but in, but I, and so I had to just ask again and again about this in a way that was sometimes I felt, uh, almost like, uh, I felt almost bad that I was making them relive this trauma. But, but I did, you know, like, um, in the process, I think get a hint of [00:20:00] what it was like to live, I mean, because they truly do like, throw themselves into these cases.
And a 24 7 sort of way to live in a, in that environment for months on end. And I think everyone involved was traumatized and, and changed. I mean, their ideas about what human beings are capable, uh, were changed and so are, so were mine to some.
Blake: Well, I think it's super important reporting and I think, you know, uh, you've really, sometimes I think even the agents covering this material can be a bit of a thankless job, right? And, and so I think highlighting their stories and really spending that time with them. Certainly being an empathetic interviewer and listening to them and getting their stories on paper, I think certainly serves as a validation of the importance of the work that they're doing, even against these horrific circumstances.
Um, but on a lighter note, I will say I was very impressed with your ability to make me cheer for the irs. Uh, [00:21:00] that's, uh, not something you see every day. So, and, and I thought the way that you unpacked kind of the pecking order of some of the agencies involved in these cryptocurrency cases was really interesting, right?
You had the IRS sometimes relegated to the kids table, right. And, uh, despite their massive contributions, uh, do you think your book will maybe change the reputations of some of these agencies?
Andy: well. . I definitely like to tell underdogs stories, so that was like part of why I loved the fact that IRS was so central to so much of this. I have to say also that when you're a reporter trying to get. People that tell you stories who often don't tell stories like federal agencies. Uh, the IRS was, was more willing to talk than like the fbi for instance.
The FBI has a very too cool for school mentality about this. It was really hard to get them to even talk about the few parts of these cases that I didn't really need to tell. But the IRS is, I think, a little sick of being relegated, as you said to the kids table. So, um, I think that they wanted some of the [00:22:00] credit they deserved, you know, for, for their.
On these cases? I'm sorry.
Blake: what's, what's the impact that you hope this book will have?
Andy: I didn't really intend. Book to be a message sending book so much as like a, um, uh, a chronicle of a really crazy period in the history of the internet where there was this, this gap, at least for the last 10 years, between the perceptions of people who thought that they were untraceable and the people who were.
Capably tracing them and the dramatic, the crazy circumstances that that created, the massive cases that resulted, If there is a message in this book, I guess it's a, you know, a kind of public service announcements. This is, that's actually Sarah Michael John's term for it, about the privacy problems of cryptocurrency. And in some cases I truly do think of them as problems.
I mean, [00:23:00] it's fun and easy in a way to tell these cops and robbers stories and to root for the investigators, chasing people doing bad things. Um, but it's not that simple, you know? I mean, Bitcoin was exciting in part because it seemed like it offered an escape valve. This pervasive financial surveillance that you know is everywhere in the traditional banking system and credit cards and everything can be so easily tracked in our usual money systems.
Everything in the cashless economy. And Bitcoin seemed to be an antidote to that, like true cash, uh, for the internet and it really was not. And the fact that that's escape valve turned out to be a trap is not an entirely happy story. , you know, and the fact that like this kind of financial surveillance is possible with cryptocurrencies isn't something I feel like entirely comfortable about either.
You know, I tried to get into that [00:24:00] and, you know, throughout the book in different places and at the end of the book, but I didn't really want this just to be a, a true crime story or a pro law enforcement.
Bella: so we, we talked a little bit about like how Bitcoin is just not as anonymous as, as weve. Previously thought it was, uh, but I think there's one really interesting like anonymous person that we haven't talked a whole lot about yet. Uh, so I, I think it's kind of wild that you are one of the last people to get a message routed to the mysterious figure behind all of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Um, and it doesn't really seem like, from what I've read, that you've gotten a lot of theories about who they might be like in the book, at least. Uh, do you have thoughts on who that might be? Or do you even think that their identity matters at this Point?
Andy: Well, it's interesting, yeah. That you bring that up. I, to be clear, you're referring, I think, to the fact that when I wrote the Forbes magazine article about Bitcoin in [00:25:00] 2011, I asked Gavin Andresen, one of like the primary Bitcoin programmers, you know, developers to pass along a message to Satoshi for me and um,
Blake: to listeners, we weren't suggesting that Andy has Satoshi's email address or anything like that.
Bella: Yeah, that's a really important clarification.
Andy: we actually, you know, he did have a public email address at that point, and he was still responding to it. I guess I didn't know what it was. I, you know, I was just so new to the beat that, that, you know, I was like one of the only reporters, maybe the only reporter at that, I don't wanna give myself that much credit.
I was, you know, one of very few reporters at the time who was even looking at Bitcoin. Um, sotoshi passed a note through Gavin Andreesson just saying he declined to comment. But even that, I, I'm not sure there's any other media stories out there that even have a sotoshi declined to comment in them, which is, which seems so bizarre in retrospect because now he's this legendary, you know, absolute mystery and, you know, uh, It.
[00:26:00] I didn't include this in the book because it's not, uh, something I've ever truly been like personally interested in, but I have gone down several satoshi hunting rabbit holes that resulted in stories good and bad, I should say. Like I, um, at one point, uh, believed that Hal Finn was Satoshi Nakamoto. Halen was the second ever user of Bitcoin.
This is a very long and complicated story, but when Newsweek came up with who they thought was the creator of Bitcoin, this guy Dorian Nakamoto, I discovered that Halen, the second ever user of Bitcoin, lived just down the street from where Dorian Nakamoto lived for many years. And that seemed to me to be a assigned that health had at least helped to create Bitcoin.
Maybe he'd even used Dorian naca. Um, as his fake name, Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, that's his middle name, as a kind of way to disguise himself. And a lot of people believe that. Hal, um, was Satoshi. [00:27:00] I eventually visited Hal, uh, at his home. And at the time he was very sadly dying. He was paralyzed with, uh, ALS.
These were like the last months of his life really. He was unable to even communicate with me, except through like a kind of eye movement tracking, typing system and like raising his eyebrows. He denied being Satoshi and he showed me some evidence that he was not, and I believe him. Um, I, I came to the conclusion before publishing any stories.
It was, I, I published a story that was about, you know, about how, who was a remarkable, really wonderful person. Um, a had had his hands in. Like incredible, um, crypto actual encryption and cryptocurrency, um, developments, but I don't think he was sotoshi.
Blake: One thing that I think you do really well in the book is talking about some of these, even the technical aspects of like how a Zcash works, how [00:28:00] it sort of melds all of these different transactions into one sort of mix up situation and enables more anonymity than Bitcoin and tries to go after some of these.
Um, really complex mechanisms that maybe evaded some of the early adopters of cryptocurrencies. It's really complex stuff, right? There's a lot to unpack. Uh, it can be hard to follow for the technically uninitiated, and I think your book does a really great job of, uh, getting people to understand enough, to really feel compelled by the story and really engage with it directly.
Part of. I think you do that. you know, you have so many colorful characters that you bring to life, right? Whether it's Bitcoin, Jesus, or Octopus guy that really helped whisk the story right along.
Do you have a favorite character in that, uh, in the lineup that you, that you included It?
Andy: I would say that my favorite character is, is the main character of the story. I mean, there's a reason why I chose to focus so much of the story on Terin Terin Gumbar, this IRS criminal investigator.
Um, you know, [00:29:00] it, it is, he is just like a wonderful, um, mix of, . He is a nerd. He's an accountant. He's a forensic accountant. He like spent years working at the IRS auditing people. Um, but he's also this Armenian immigrants who has lived in, in, uh, post Soviet Moscow for much of his childhood and witnessed like, he had a very difficult childhood.
He's like a very tough sort of post Soviet guy in many ways. Like, and if that's not an unfair character, He has this chip on his shoulder. He's like tired of the lack of respect that IRS gets. He is a true, you know, gun toing federal agent who, who has ambitions of like, taking down bad guys and knocking down doors and like hauling people to prison.
And, and he has this like, uh, very clear sense of right and wrong. He's just a, like [00:30:00] a, you know, a really unplaceable character in that way and. and, uh, it was just a wonderful gift to the story that he is also, uh, he is, I guess, Bitcoin Jesus. He's referred as, uh, as that in some, in some cases because he was kind of the Bitcoin whisperer within so much of law enforcement.
he was at the center of so many of these cases. Um, so, you know, he is the one who, who with chain analysis located the alpha base server. He is the one, um, Traced Bitcoins for the very first time to prove someone's guilt in, um, the beginning of the book. You know, and he is also involved in the Welcome to Video case and so many others.
He eventually seizes, uh, I don't wanna spoil too many things, but he, he, he, at one point, like broke the record for seizing more, not just Bitcoin, but any kind of currency, um, in Department of Justice history. So, um, you know, uh, I do . [00:31:00] I feel very grateful to TIG Grand that he told me these stories and, and that he's such a, a weird and unusual figure.
Bella: so to wrap things up, we have a question for you that we ask of all of our interviewees. Uh, what is something that we wouldn't know about you just by looking at your LinkedIn profile or your other online social media presence?[00:32:00]
Andy: I'm trying to think of like what I do in my life that does not work these days. Um,
Bella: Uh, too relatable
Andy: I guess one thing that I do not include on my LinkedIn resume is that I briefly had a. A career you could, I dunno, more like a job as a Chinese language, children's music recording artist. And I, I like, uh, . Yeah. I lived in China for a while. I spoke Chinese and that, and then I, I was like somewhat desperate for work and um, and like recorded some, some Chinese language children's music that's maybe out there.
Blake: You didn't save copies? Is this, is this, is it etched into the blockchain somewhere? I have to give this a listen.
Andy: I've been, you know, a reporter covering cyber security for like 15 years, so before like 2005. It does, doesn't it feel like things are not like in the permanent record in the same way, which is [00:33:00] really a good thing for, for me as you.
Blake: yeah, the internet archive is helpful, but only, only goes so far ultimately for some of these things. So, um, but no, that is definitely a, a, a fun fact and, uh, one that I'm sure our listeners will appreciate, uh, learning about you. And, and thank you again for, for joining us. Really fascinating book.
Definitely recommend everybody give it a read. Um, it's a, it's, it's really a, a crowning achievement of, of reporting, and an excellent. Primer on all these super important issues that are really only, uh, sticking with us for the long term. You know, Bitcoin's here to stay, so it's, it's fascinating
Andy:. Thank you for talking about it and thanks for those. Yeah, that's, that's very kind of you. I mean, um, especially coming from you, Blake., I've, I've followed your reporting for years and. You've also done some amazing work. Let me, I, I, maybe I shouldn't say this cuz Bella, I'm not sure if you're a reporter too and I don't wanna like, um, or were a reporter previously.
Okay. Okay. So I hope that's not like rude to say that. Um,
Blake: Now Bella's got the technical chops in [00:34:00] this, in this, uh, interview for sure.
Bella: All I know is cybersecurity. Nothing else. Do not worry.
Andy: Well, you probably just do like the actual impressive stuff that you then do not publish, like me and Blake who are just, you know, showing off all the time.
Bella: Most of my career I cannot talk about or publish. So yeah.
Andy: well then we should definitely talk again sometime. Um,
Bella: uh, oh, wait a minute,
Andy: it's been a pleasure. Thank you all for having.