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by lordnacho 1529 days ago
It's non-trivial to go from a list of transactions to having a nicely indexed DB with convenient tools for investigating.

It's correct that you can trace transactions through the blockchain, but in practice you need something like Reactor to be built and maintained. It's not going to be obvious to police, because the skill is a specialized thing in the domain of coders, and those coders have to have a reason to look at blockchain.

1 comments

The police department will ask IT, they will Google it, and tell the cops to use one of the various commercial options used to deanonymize wallets and transaction trails. A credit card payment or trial sign-up later and if the service is any good, they'll have what they need.

I'd put anything available to the general public in the "trivial" camp, even if the underlying tech is fantastically complex or difficult.

Can't say it's trivial if they actually needed a guy from the firm to work with them on this?

I mean sure if there's some self service website then yeah. Keep in mind this is back in 2017 though, a lot of stuff has matured since.