The Dangers of Perceived Anonymity: Russian Hackers' Bitcoin Trail

With the release by the Department of Justice of an indictment of twelve Russian intelligence officers last Friday, which includes a count of an alleged conspiracy to launder money 'through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin,' statesmen of this bent have procured a powerful supplement to their rhetorical toolkit - a formally recorded instance of a Bitcoin-backed interference into a vital sector of domestic affairs.

While Democratic lawmakers now have all the latitude to exploit the Bitcoin menace in pushing the collusion agenda against the Trump administration, Republicans wishing to blast cryptocurrencies as a national security threat will have to be careful with the evidence produced by the investigation that the president and his allies have repeatedly challenged.

The controversy around possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election became a constant in the US public discourse even before the campaign itself has concluded.

The recent indictment presents a timeline of the hackings in granular detail.

The scope of its interest includes everything related to the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, including the Trump campaign's possible cooperation and coordination with Russians.

According to the investigators, Russian officials used a variety of sources and currencies, including US dollars, in order to support the scheme, but their primary instrument was Bitcoin due to its 'perceived anonymity.

The hackers also bothered to diversify the sources from which they drew the money, from peer-to-peer deals to decentralized exchanges to running their own mining operation.

As the indictment's authors observed, 'The use of Bitcoin allowed the Conspirators to avoid direct relationships with traditional financial institutions, allowing them to evade greater scrutiny of their identities and sources of funds.

The DOJ investigators were also able to track the Bitcoin that the GRU mining rig produced all the way to the Romanian company that registered the dcleaks.com domain.

In crypto subreddits, users habitually call for the media to leave Bitcoin alone and instead 'mention the Colombian drug lords getting paid billions in USD for selling drugs.