SHA256X2 on Nostr: That enormous data trove will no doubt inspire and enable much more AI-focused ...

That enormous data trove will no doubt inspire and enable much more AI-focused research into bitcoin money laundering, says Stefan Savage, a computer science professor at the University of California San Diego who served as adviser to the lead author of a seminal bitcoin-tracing paper published in 2013. He argues, though, that the current tool doesn't seem likely to revolutionize anti-money-laundering efforts in crypto in its current form, so much as serve as a proof of concept. “An analyst, I think, is going to have a hard time with a tool that's kind of right sometimes,” Savage says. “I view this as an advance that says, ‘Hey, there's a thing here. More people should work on this.’”

Savage warns, though, that AI-based money-laundering investigation tools will likely raise new ethical and legal questions if they end up being used as actual criminal evidence—in part because AI tools often serve as a “black box” that provides a result without any explanation of how it was produced. “This is on the edge where people get uncomfortable in the same way they get uncomfortable about face recognition,” he says. “You can't quite explain how it works, and now you're depending on it for decisions that may have an impact on people's liberty.”

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-crypto-tracing-model-money-laundering/