First, Bitcoin has a public ledger, though it just gives addresses related to your private key. But you can follow the flow of transactions, and at present it is not privacy respecting (yet). Each transaction has source addresses and payment addresses, with change coming back to a wallet address, but you have some protection if you don’t reuse addresses. You can also use mixers to anonymize your bitcoin with others and render it untrackable, or just convert it to another cryptocurrency and back through trusted exchanges that don’t know who you are. So keep that in mind as the video talks about tracking Bitcoin. I’ll make my main hypothesis after.
So the history of Ross Ulbricht is that he was one of many Dread Pirate Roberts admins for the Silk Road dark web market, kind of an E-Bay for anything which didn’t need to be legal, though mainly illegal drugs. The government arrested him and made him out to be the main conspirator behind the platform, and a federal judge refused to let him present his defense about being one of many admins, or bring in that an FBI agent involved in the case had stolen a significant sum of Bitcoin. So it appeared that Ross suffered a great injustice and was given life in prison. That is until Trump reverses course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies granting him a pardon in his second term as president. In fairness, his mother and other supporters were going around raising money for his appeal, and it seemed like a genuine effort.
But what if Ross is someone’s asset? I say that because he received $31 million in Bitcoin, which isn’t a bad sum for the inconvenience of being locked up for so long which also lends great credibility. And now he is perfectly setup to go around giving talks and getting involved in crypto ventures to be embraced by those in the community that are opposed to the banking system. Nobody just comes up off of $31 million like that. It’s also possible that he was recruited in prison, but I’d watch him going forward with a very curious eye and suspicion. And they love to run and control the opposition.