No, money will always be used for crime as long as money and crime exists. People invent new crimes, People invent new money. Crime is the problem, not the money.
I would argue that money that can be used in this context is extremely valuable, as it is beyond the state. This is a very awful situation, and I feel for the victims, but the existence of cryptocurrency is not the problem, any more than cryptography is the problem wrt ransomware.
Tech can be used in many forms. Use it properly. Find and bring those to justice that do not. Don't blame the tools.
So, at least where I live, you can "buy stuff" with BC.
However, there are a number of benefits; for one, average ticket size is about 20% higher for credit transactions vs cash (if I recall correctly) and merchants do not have to hold onto and manage piles of cash. This is a material cost savings.
Further, of that 3%, about 0.1% goes to Visa, the rest goes to the issuing bank and covers the cost of rewards programs and loan origination. Generally speaking between 1 and 2% of that will be rebated to the buyer.
For the remaining 0.9-1.9%, customers get benefits like insurance and the ability to issue chargebacks.
In Europe, debit interchange is capped at 0.2% and credit at 0.3%, and they just don't have insurance or rewards.
As it stands today if you wanted to transact in crypto, not only will you pay the $30 fee, you'll also be paying the mark-up for credit acceptance.
Only bitcoin and ethereum have fees in this range. Other cryptocurrencies do not.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...
Of course the "average" might be more bytes than buying a pack of gum but the argument still holds that the transaction costs are prohibitive for general commerce.
When your economy revolves around an entity armed to the teeth you don't need consensus.
The USD is an inflationary currency and Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. Right now Bitcoin is extremely deflationary and so there is extreme savings, but that is not sustainable indefinitely. Whether it becomes more popular to spend Bitcoin after the value levels out remains to be seen, but deflationary Bitcoin will always tend to encourage savings more than inflationary competitors like the USD.
Technology comes with negative externalities.
The cryptocurrency world needs to accept that it does have negative externalities, and show that the benefits outweigh them, rather than pretending that they don't exist.
I'm personally not convinced that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh the downsides.
In the case of general purpose computing, the upsides are obvious and massive. Whereas it's much, much less clear that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh their downsides.
If I say cash and banks get used by the vast majority of organized crime I'd be factually correct, but I'd also be accused of whataboutism. In a world without crypto I'd be seriously hampered by an unfair economic system, so to me personally the pros outweigh the cons, but it'd be anecdotal evidence. Hope you see what I'm trying to get at.
Whether or not a technology's pros outweigh its cons is some appropriately weighted average across all the people that it affects. The person who gets hit by crypto-enabled ransomware likely feels differently from you.
I also think there is some moral weight to particular benefits. Dealing with unfair economic systems is definitely a "better" benefit (for some definition of good) than those people whose benefits are currency speculation or ransomware.
Governments and banks can't touch your money or see what you're doing unless they get your keys. What other reasons do you need?
We don't need anyone's permission or blessing either. We want our freedom back and society's gonna have to accept this. If that means more crime, energy consumption or whatever -- so be it.
The answer is to get rid of poverty and unequal opportunities.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But if you’re dissecting a problem, at least present all the pieces.
Just because they figured out a technologically advanced way to do it doesn't mean it becomes ok.
This seems to fly in the face of the facts. Namely, that ransomware was virtually impossible to conduct before digital currency, due to the traceability of electronic money, and all current ransomware uses cryptocurrency rather than any other form of payment.
It's the exploitation that's bad whether it takes the form of scams or profits
If someone is killed in a crime of passion, where's the monetary exploitation?
Seriously, I can't think of a single positive use case of crypto currency. So while it can be used for some things, it seems to me that the only concrete use case that is already happening, is crime.
All other stories on that podcast list are very interesting.
I think the IRS scammers still usually ask for something like that instead of cryptocurrency, because cryptocurrency is a bit too hard for their marks to figure out.
And there is literally no one to fine because no one owns the “ledger”. That’s the joy of a decentralized blockchain
You could increase taxes on cryptocurrency capital gains. Big exchanges would absolutely report those gains to the IRS and you could be on the hook for a bigger bill.
It's not impossible to regulate this stuff. Yes, some folks will figure out ways around the regulations, but you'd catch most tech-unsavvy people just fine.
You need some intergovernmental agreements, but it's possible
For example, the author of the wannacry failed at layering and exchanging his Bitcoins into fiat.
Source: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/publications/virtualassets/documen...
There will always be a way to get illegal cash, ransomware just became much simpler with cryptocurrency. Now that the trend is here to lock your systems for ransom I don't think they will go away with cryptocurrency.
Monero, on the other hand...
- Ban anonymous cryptocurrencies.
- In pseudonymous cryptos, mark any address that has been the destination of a ransomware payment or demand as tainted. Any net positive transaction from a tainted source wallet marks the destination wallet as tainted. (I.e. you are obligated to return tainted monies to tainted wallets if they send money to you.)
- Exchanges are forbidden to deal with tainted wallets, or with any exchange that deals with tainted wallets.
While you're at it, I guess you could mark any wallet funded at an exchange that doesn't KYC as tainted as well, to limit the use of crypto for money laundering.
I'm guessing we're going to figure a lot of this stuff out in the next 10-20 years, if the crypto craze doesn't die off naturally during that timeframe.
The real fault lies with institutions rushing to half-assedly digitize so now they're wide open to script kiddies, and with enterprise IT providers doing a piss-poor job at doing correct software engineering. And now you're suggesting more savagery like it's some sort of solution to anything at all?
The war on drugs is bad because it doesn't work, and because drugs cause less harm than fighting them does. It's not an apt comparison to the situation we're talking about.
Which of the following causes more harm in total: (a) a ransomware gang attacking the computers of a hospital, thus endangering the lives of its patients; or (b) law-abiding citizens adhering to a historically contingent economic system which leaves millions of people without access to healthcare?
B) Use your laundered dirty money in other addresses to pump the token on uniswap (or any AMM)
C) Sell the token from address in A) back into the Uniswap liquidity pool at a massive profit, enjoy the profits and reintegrated money. You look like any trader.
D) Bag hold the token in the address from B) and never think about it again and never worry about trying to cash that out. In addition that address can add to the liquidity pool and provide a service to all other traders indefinitely.
E) Laugh at people that are still imagining how difficult it is to launder money on public ledgers. Blockchain detectives on their wild goose chase looking at the wrong addresses.
Do this all over time, and not immediately pumping a token with the laundered money.
Sure, I’ll probably get more scrutiny after writing this but you won’t. I really hate chilled speech and people having dumb ideas because the should-be-obvious reality is never talked about. The point is that the trader behavior is indistinguishable from others, and there are no financial intermediaries on permissionless AMMs to flag anything.
(This style of intentionally introducing a pricing error and arbitraging it yourself happens for real and is not always particularly profitable. You can read about the foreign exchange fixing antitrust shenanigans. Some traders thought they were being very clever, and, according to Matt Levine, made relatively small amounts of money and ended up getting seriously smacked down. The feds and the courts may be slow, but they’re not dumb.)
This all seems very abstract, but, when you try to spend what you think were carefully laundered ransomware gains on a nice beach in France or Florida and Interpol or the FBI arrests you, the resulting trial and prison time will be considerably less abstract. :)
Sounds like a great benefit for the government