Just veering off the main topic for a minute to visit old pastures. A couple of news stories about bitcoin exchanges and disappearing funds...
https://www.ccn.com/new-zealand-bitcoin-exchange-cryptopia-postpones-launch
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bitcoin-exchange-quadrigacx-password-cryptocurrency-scam-a8763676.html
This is by no means the first time bitcoin has disappeared of course. Remember MtGox and Mark Karples, or the Silk Road investigation, where a huge amount of coins went missing during the investigation.
Something about these latest cases is a little mystifying to me. I did some work on tracing coin a few years back. Bitcoin is an open ledger. It was always pretty easy to track coins at any point, to find out when coins were transferred out of a wallet and follow the trail downstream, with the right tools. And analytics have improved plenty too, with techniques like heuristic clustering used to cluster wallets together by ownership (working out who owns a given wallet is the harder part). There are companies that specialize in bitcoin analytics. So, what's going on? Why is it so hard to follow illicit coins and blacklist them? Is there some nation state actor (I wonder who?) at work stealing it and converting to hard currency? Perhaps ransomware isn't raising enough these days?
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