Cambridge Scholars Find Innovative Way To Track Your Stolen Bitcoins

By Prashant Jha

Given that Bitcoin thefts are such a common occurrence these days, crypto investors will be relieved to learn that a new and innovative way of tracking stolen Bitcoins has been devised by three scholars from the Cambridge University, a highly reputed and sought after university in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Till now, the statistics indicate, Bitcoins worth more than a whopping figure of 1 Billion US dollars have been stolen. Unfortunately, the majority of these stolen coins have remained untraceable and subsequently, unrecoverable. However, it finally seems that there is a way to take care of this issue.

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The three Cambridge scholars working with this are namely Manoor Ahmed, Rose Anderson and Ilia Shumailor and they have together released a paper titled the “Tendrils of Crime”, in which they have detailed their plans to go ahead with recovery of stolen Bitcoins.

The idea that is posited by the said paper is a system called the “Taintchain”. This makes use of a device named the FIFO (first-in-first-out). Now this FIFO system is not exactly new, it is a merely an adaptation of what has long been an existing practice in the world of accounting. In fact, in recent times, the legal system has begun to include this term.

Now, what this FIFO device does is that it calculates the number of basic units, or satoshis, in each Bitcoin. These basic units carry all the relevant information needed to make transactions possible. After this, according to the Cambridge scholars, FIFO can trace and monitor the movement of the transactions within one unit along the path back to the genesis wallet. The idea behind FIFO, or “first in first out” is that, if certain coins go into a wallet after being stolen in a particular order, then they were also removed from the wallet in that same order.

However, even this new innovation is not entirely foolproof as it does not solve the issues that remain with wallets that have more sophisticated features such as input control or coin control, whereby users can choose the order of coins to be used in transactions.

Although the scholars themselves are confident of the work, experts believe more work requires to be done to fine tune their research to design a more viable solution to the rampant problem.