The Property Thesis · 4 of 8
Bitcoin and crypto assets
A permanent public ledger waits for one link to the outside world, and then reads backwards.
Bearer value with no intermediary.
The Bitcoin ledger is public and permanent. In August 2016, 119,756 bitcoin were stolen from the Bitfinex exchange. Investigators followed the funds on the public chain, a warranted cloud-storage file linked the addresses, arrests came in February 2022, and bitcoin then worth $3.6 billion was seized.7 Exchanges that convert to and from currency verify their customers’ identity.
Every new link, an exchange account, a leak, a spending pattern, reads the whole history backwards. Analysis improves every year. The ledger does not change.
Pseudonymous today, attributable later. Retroactive de-anonymization waits only for one link.