When Bitcoin launched in 2009, the virtual currency was heralded as virtually untraceable — an alarming prospect for crimefighters — until a team of computer scientists at the University of California San Diego devised a clever tracing technique that could in fact follow the money.
Nearly a decade later, the team led by Sarah Meiklejohn, then a PhD student in the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is still credited with shedding light on the structure of the Bitcoin economy and how it is used. Their 2013 paper, “A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names,” was recognized with a Test-of-time Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024 held recently in Madrid, Spain.