Russia has funded the US election using the Bitcoin
According to the report, clients acting on behalf of the Russian military intelligence have used Bitcoin coins to do everything, from buying virtual private networks (VPNs) to buying domain addresses hosting political propaganda. This was part of a large-scale and seemingly successful attempt to break the 2016 election, which saw Trump beat all expectations.
Bitcoin coefficients are easy to trace
While this may not be new information to anyone familiar with digital currencies, it seems that Russian clients have acted on the false assumption that simply doing their transactions using a digital currency makes them anonymous and can not be tracked. In fact - as has been proven several times - the Bitcoin transactions are not difficult to track, given some basic data.
In this case, while the Russian clients tried to manage the main intelligence (GRU) to operate outside the traditional financial systems by conducting transactions exclusively in the currency of the BTC, but the investigation team of the "Muller" was able to discover them because of their use of platforms for currency trading. One of these platforms is the notorious BTC-e platform, headed by Alexander Vinnik, who is currently imprisoned in Greece amid a triangular diplomatic dispute between Russia, the United States, and France.
FBI agents - who had access to a few of the e-mail addresses used to create accounts on these platforms - were able to gather a broader picture of who did BTC transactions using the publicly available transaction log.
In other words, even Russian intelligence did not discover that if left to the smallest crumbs of assets used for investigators, it can detect the entire course of assets, as did Mueller. The effect of the use of Bitcoin for the implementation of each transaction associated with Russian involvement in the 2016 elections was that the Muller team did not have to do much work to identify and link the transactions, because the blockchain records basically did all the related work on behalf of the team. Instead of searching for evidence and proofs, Muller obtained a "Trojan Horse", which allowed him access to all the financial transactions of secret Russian secret services that interfere in the US elections.
A very prominent Russian failure
While the Russians celebrated their apparent breach of America's internal democracy, they apparently did not think about covering their paths sufficiently. The report states that GRU customers used a combination of false and stolen identities to set up accounts on the digital currency platforms. These accounts were then used to purchase servers and domains in order to penetrate the DNC server, as well as to leak and disseminate stolen material during the hack.
The Müller team was able to track the purchase of the VPN - which was made using bitcoin - for GRU customers. According to the report, this virtual network was used to manage "@ guccifer_2", a Twitter account that leaked information to Wikileaks and participated in other activities aimed at interfering in the US elections.
The full impact of the Muller report remains unknown - with Trump announcing the victory and the Democrats' proposal to isolate it - but what seems clear at this time is that the use of Bitcoin for secret transactions can now be deposited under the name of "dinosaur activity." The CCN website has reported that US law enforcement has invested millions in expanding blockchain tracking, but Muller's report is conclusive proof that digital surveillance is now a common practice.