Of course they can identify it. The public ledger is... public.
Either:
They cracked or have a backdoor into ECDSA encryption and they were willing to expose that capability publicly to save a mere $2M.
The US was behind the hack themselves.
#1 would cause a lot of digital systems involving ECDSA to crumble. You'd also see other systems crumble as people would likely lose trust in many encryption techniques. This does not make sense for recovering $2M. The only other explanation is that it was an inside job.
You can, through chainalysis, find where a wallet is located by checking which miners relay transactions first and which IP addresses connected to which nodes. You just have to have access to many nodes yourself.
Of course they can identify it. The public ledger is... public.
Either:
They cracked or have a backdoor into ECDSA encryption and they were willing to expose that capability publicly to save a mere $2M.
The US was behind the hack themselves.
#1 would cause a lot of digital systems involving ECDSA to crumble. You'd also see other systems crumble as people would likely lose trust in many encryption techniques. This does not make sense for recovering $2M. The only other explanation is that it was an inside job.
Very true.
You can, through chainalysis, find where a wallet is located by checking which miners relay transactions first and which IP addresses connected to which nodes. You just have to have access to many nodes yourself.