Investigating Cryptocurrencies

CHAPTER 15Putting It All Together

This book has the subtitle “Understanding, Extracting, and Analyzing Blockchain Evidence,” and it has attempted to provide an appropriate level of theoretical understanding while teaching practical techniques for carrying out an investigation involving cryptocurrencies. Although Bitcoin is still the biggest cryptocurrency, it is arguably not the best, and new pretenders to the throne are being released every day. Although this book has had a Bitcoin focus, I hope it has prepared you and given you the necessary tools to be able to research and develop techniques for any new cryptocurrency that may need your attention.

The different types of crimes that may involve cryptocurrency use are virtually unending and eventually could find their way into almost any category of crime. A few years ago, I gave a talk at a local school about my job as a digital investigator, and before I started, the teacher asked what crimes involved computers. She had assumed it was all hacking and viruses, so she was surprised when I listed burglary, murders, drug dealing, and all the other “real world” crimes. The fact is that in the past 10 years, virtually every crime has some type of digital aspect to it—whether it's cell phone call data, searches made about a crime on Google, or digital CCTV systems—the list is endless. In the United States, a man killed his wife and dumped her body in a lake, and he was convicted partially on the basis of googling “the deepest place ...