A 27-year-old busted the myth of Bitcoin's anonymity

Is there short term for the following phenomenon?

Articles for the general public create a false impression. This false impression becomes pervasive in public discussion. Later some events make it self-evident that it is not true. New articles come busting this myth and giving the impression that those who relied on technology believed it.

What a preposterously stupid title and premise for an article. Nobody with a clue thought crypto was anonymous to begin with. It's a public ledger, it's a hyper transparent technology, it's almost the polar opposite of anonymous and untraceable.

If this article, more honestly said "a 27 year old developed a technique for tracing and de-anonymizing crypto" the article would make more sense.

I don't get it, who thought it was ever anonymous?

Bitcoin has a public ledger by design. It has never been anonymous, it is only pseudonymous.

I don't get why it's "A 27 year-old".

How is that relevant? 27-year-olds should be at peak capability, if not productivity, especially in maths.

If it said "A 9-year-old" that would be news-worthy, suggesting bitcoin anonymity was always a case of the emperors new clothes.

This reminds me very much of an excerpt from a Michael Lewis book. A complex topic boiled down into simple analogies accessible for laypersons and personalized with character details: a childhood of odd obsessions, hints of precociousness, a good but not superstar academic career, brushing up against the more famous. And like Lewis (I enjoy his writing), breathless, and, if you actually know the subject, so simplified and over dramatic to be misleading. Not even wrong. I’m sure the book from which this is excerpted is full of fun stories and quirky characters. In the case of the “27-year old”, she’s interested in puzzles and language at a young age, which turns into studying cryptography. To the muggles, this all probably seems eccentric and obsessive, but to the average HN reader, not particularly strange. Similarly, describing her activities as “one of the strangest, most hyperactive Bitcoin users in the world” is dramatic, but undercut by “In all, Meiklejohn carried out 344 cryptocurrency transactions over the course of a few weeks.” Not criticizing Meiklejohn, whose work is clever and interesting, or the author, who is writing to his audience, but I think I will pass on the book.

> Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable.

Yeah, criminals may not be the smartest bunch. Everybody who understands how the bitcoin blockchain works knows transactions can be traced.