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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

From the article: Meanwhile, the Kantō Rengō members had started out working as drivers and bodyguards for the heads of major entertainment agencies. By this time, they were starting their own businesses, like loan sharking, adult movie production, and IT. The different members were pushing forward with their own various businesses. I myself had a legitimate web advertising firm that was highly profitable and growing rapidly.

There isn't much money in street crime. Unloading stolen goods is dead. Who wants a partly broken used car stereo? Any TV one person can lift is worthless. Used computers are E-waste. The old-line criminal organizations are either being bypassed or are moving into more profitable areas. Initial coin offerings, binary options, FOREX, and payday loans are the new big moneymakers.

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> Unloading stolen goods is dead.

Street crime has simply moved on: From pirated movies to hacked phone cards to peddling forged goods trough legitimate-looking online fonts.

Peddling drugs is as lucrative as ever just like the various side-shows of gambling/red light district incomes, where there's often a very fluid line between commercialized "security services" and organized gang crime.

And let's not even start with "Internet crime" which is basically the new "street crime" not because it's that much more lucrative but because it's that much more convenient and less dangerous than physical involvement.

> Initial coin offerings, binary options, FOREX, and payday loans are the new big moneymakers.

That's what the Yakuza actually started out as: White collar CEO Gangsters. As I understand it the only reason the Kantō Rengō can now take over that role is because Japanese anti-Gang laws increasingly cracking down on the established old-school Yakuza, thus creating a power vacuum these Kantō Rengō are filling.

They might be less traditional in their ways, but they are pretty much running the same racket the Yakuza have been running.

Just to make sure, you mean in Japan, right? Because unloading stolen goods are alive and well in countries where cell phone prices are high and average income is low(my personal experience is with the situation in Brazil).

Phones are easy to steal, people just start using them and lose focus on their surroundings, thieves can just grab and run, they are easy to conceal and a lot of people want to own an iPhone and can't afford it, there is a market.

I know there are ways to brick the device to make it unusable after it is stolen but most people are unaware of how that works.

If “find my iPhone” is on and it’s a 64 bit iPhone there is no way to use it without knowing the iCloud details of the account it is registered to.

AI, bitcoin, and street gangs with ICOs: we really do live in a cyberpunk future.

Except when you live below the API. Then your life becomes a dystopian nightmare.

And we don't even get the fancy fashion and gadgets, I expected way more mohawks, gas masks, and cyber glasses.

And we got hoodies and neckbeards.

Maybe it did not affect the lead characters as much, but a brutal disparity of wealth was always part of the cyberpunk aesthetic.

Has the label cyberpunk ever been applied to something that wasn't a dystopian nightmare?

The closest I can think of is the original Dracula, a story about a group of young, tech savvy people using all the latest gadgets, networks and information technology to fight off a threat to the urbanized world. But that is not often identified as cyberpunk and what it lacks in dystopia it certainly makes up in nightmare.

Interesting! A steampunk Dracula with precisely those themes would be fantastic.

Read the book with an open eye for all the ways the human protagonists are empowered by the latest in contemporary high tech. They are only winning because of cutting edge (at the time) information technology: shorthand, the telegraph network, wax cylinder audio recordings, expert application of knowledge about train schedules. (And souped up steamboats)

It already has everything that steampunk can be, except for the subtext of condescending mockery that often happens when current writers look at the historical technology.

Why would you engage in street crime when you have an organization that can force someone to sell his property or business to you at half its market value and make 10,000x as much money? Street crime is for unorganized desperate people, not people who do crime as a profession.

"There isn't much money in street crime. "

Ummm i disagree. There has never been more money in drugs than today. Opioid crisis anyone? Just americans spend over 100billion dollars per year on drugs. Drugs fund a lot of things in this world.

There is plenty of money in the drug trade and human trafficking as well as wholesale theft.

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