Why this expert says to fight ransomware, we need to ban cryptocurrency

The main factor in determining electricity source when mining bitcoin is cost, not production methods. Just like you don't consider how your household electricity was produced, just that the bill is low.

If you're upset about miners' the chunk of energy being produced by coal, you should be concerned about coal usage in overall society.

If there's coal-powered electricity is expensive or unavailable for anyone to use, bitcoin miners will automatically stop using it along with the rest of society.

This statement is true for many other industries.

>>No, as long as it has drastic side effects that affect others.

If the side effect is pollution, then prohibit pollution-emitting energy consumption. Don't use this as a pretense to suppress activities you don't like, by singling those activities you personally don't like, among the innumerable many non-essential activities that consume electricity, for prohibition.

The rest of the effects, like retail gamblers losing money on bad investments, are voluntarily assumed, and could not possibly be worse than state-run lotteries consuming 8% of the poorest households' annual income.

>>Poe's law strikes here hard.

I substantiated my claim with multiple examples.

You may want to protest all the marijuana growers with their indoor farms and huge electric consumption. But now that MJ is regulated and taxed, nobody complains about that electricity consumption.

Not sure. I am not sure if banning anything won't make issues worse. Born in the Netherlands but travelled all my life, I see that the worst criminality and Crack addicts living on the streets and fullest prisons are in countries that ban drugs. I understand this is not the same thing (a point I tried to make in another comment) but banning seems often to make things worse. Unfortunately (seeing the comments here) I am more for blaming the victim; companies need to be forced to spend money on security and educate their people on security. In this day and age, all data should be treated as banking data, by law. And punished if you do not.

Banning crypto due to ransomware it's like banning strong cryptography due to ransomware.

Yeah sure it will make the problem 'smaller', but do you see the interesting lapse of logic there?

If we ban cars, we'll see less deaths on the road too.

Banning it would make malware encrypt your data for "fun" and not profits of malware groups. Just like viruses in the '90s were written for fun.

You still need to convert crypto into fiat at some point.

A criminal group can just hire poor people to make bitcoin exchange and bank accounts under their identities.

They can use other methods to sucker people into working for them.

So yeah criminals can get around most forms of kyc either through id theft or by employing „volunteers“.

How are both true? How does crypto make transferring money easier for everyone except criminals?

It's not really a serious proposal, but as I see it there are four groups involved.

1) Ransom-ware criminals -- they are already breaking the law and are subject to criminal enforcement 2) Irresponsible businesses who fail to secure their critical systems 3) Hardware and software vendors who don't care enough about security because #2 doesn't care 4) Presumably innocent cryptocurrency users

Banning paying ransoms adjusts the incentives for #1, #2, and #3 in beneficial ways and leaves #4 alone.

I realize this wouldn't work in practice, so it's not really a serious proposal.

And here I thought the executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center would be a real man of the people.