Tracers in the Dark

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Wired magazine has a multi-part teaser about the takeover and takedown of alphabay. Very interesting and gripping. Reads like a crime novel.

Part I: https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-series-part-1-the-shado...

Got around to reading Closer to the Machine: Technophilia & It's Discontents. It's from 1997, and is kind of a memoir about what it's like being a techie, about the changes happening. It's incredibly hard to tell the book is 25 years old. So much of it seems apt & accurate today.

One character that shows up is Brian, a crypto-libertarian who is obsessed with anonymous money. Ellen has like all kinds of protests & qualms she goes through about how awful & bad this would be.

From the other side, I'm also reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, (2020) and wow... using blockchain to track & follow & monitor all the money is a huge win for the good guys.

Build a system in which rules don't apply and rulebreakers can't be held accountable, and then be surprised when criminals flood in.

The Welcome to Video takedown was also detailed in a recent Wired article. Crazy, disturbing, and interesting.