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> “Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain, and that we will not allow cryptocurrency to be a safe haven for money laundering or a zone of lawlessness within our financial system,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

How is this not a total death blow for bitcoin? If the justice department can do it, anyone can. It's a public ledger. So you effectively must treat every transaction you ever make on the blockchain as totally public and tied directly to you.

>>mdoms+(OP)
Because there is a weak link in the methods these guys used.

The DOJ always pats itself on the back to pretend to the worldwide audience that there is "no" illicit money in the US financial system.

They don't say "good thing they didn't use X method! that would have hampered our investigation irreparably!" at least not in press releases.

>>mdoms+(OP)
It took them 6 years to catch these perps. And these perps were extremely sloppy (storing keys in cloud, weak encryption)

Justice must give the perception that they are doing enough. They can't really say that it's really hard to catch people committing crimes in cryptocurrencies.