In 2011, Wired reporter Andy Greenberg thought Bitcoin could keep users completely anonymous. But at the 2025 Bitwarden Open Source Security Summit, he said, "I slowly realized I was totally wrong about Bitcoin. It was actually the opposite of untraceable."

The person who changed his mind was Tigran Gambaryan, a criminal investigator with the IRS. Starting around 2014, Gambaryan and a company called Chainalysis exploited the fact that Bitcoin's digital record system was permanent and traceable. It gave investigators "even more power to track financial crimes than traditional banking systems."

Gambaryan's team was able to make the three biggest money seizures in U.S. Justice Department history. They tracked 650,000 stolen Bitcoins from the Mt. Gox exchange to Russian hackers, caught corru

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