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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

Ransomware groups will just switch to using wire transfer cash outs. BEC groups have been doing this for years and would regularly net tens of millions of dollars.

Before that criminals used WebMoney, eGold, Western Union, etc.

This guy is going to be shocked when he finds out Indian phone scammers regularly get victims to overnight FedEx tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gift cards.

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Crypto enthusiasts make two claims often:

1. Crypto makes it easier to transfer money without govt regulation.

2. Crypto does not make it easier for criminals to transfer money without govt regulation.

How can #1 be true and #2 be false?

No one is saying crime was impossible before crypto, just that it was more difficult and expensive (sometimes prohibitively so).

Both are true. It is up to the community of rational actors to either choose both or none at all.

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

Because it is unblockable and also traceable.

Most/all of those methods have (often much) greater friction than cryptocurrency. I'd guess that, if cryptocurrency were banned domestically, the payouts would significantly decrease, and probably reduce the frequency of these attacks.

But, even then, such a ban would probably have a negative effect on cybersecurity progress, since these incidents are motivating fundamental changes to cybersecurity awareness, policies, procedures, and technology.

Gift cards seem to be more stable than crypto (held value) and very anonymous (purchasable with cash, no-questions-asked). They do have the friction of limited amounts, the overhead of managing many cards, their acquisition without questions by employing many couriers, and liquidation.

Crypto has issues in purchasing, mixing, and liquidating.

PS: I wonder if anyone is using gift card networks for money-laundering? The answer is always "yes."

The main problem is the malware that makes you lost access to your data. (Pseudo-)anonymous payment (BTC is not fully anonymous) that facilitates the payment is just a side effect.

Backup and threat management directly address the main problem. Banning crypto just like you say, deter the payout potential, but it leaves the malware as is.

It's pretty funny when we talk ransomware payment in term of friction—as if we are talking about new payment method user which user will be inconvenienced.

Criminals doing criminal transaction don't care about 'friction', they will grind through any obstacle to move the money.

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“.

Yep. But some elements will keep blaming crypto currencies for all the ills in the world. No matter what you think of blockchain money: banning it will not solve this.

I agree banning it would not solve this.

Do you agree that banning it would make the problem smaller?

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?

Well that is what govs are trying right? No privacy because 'terrorism'.

I generally agree and don't support a ban, but cryptography is much more generally useful.

To put it another way: cryptography has many legitimate applications for normal people. Cryptocurrency does not yet (and may never, as long as civilization doesn't collapse).

Cryptocurrency, being a currency has its value tied to its utility (e.g. the usual talk about decentralized, private, and resiliency against inflation which have been beaten to death).

This is clearly an existing use for normal people. Whether it will gain wider adoption for everyday payment remains to be seen.

More importantly, it doesn't need the civilization to collapse. In fact if civilization were to collapse ain't nobody gonna validate your transaction!

Saying that coins have valued tied to their utility is like saying the same thing about Pokemon cards.

It's a speculative asset. Its value is related to its usefulness only in the minds of its users.

A currency fails if it's deflationary, expensive to transact with, extremely volatile, and unusable for most purchases.

There is currently no use-case for crypto for anyone with a functioning government, and non-functioning governments have mostly banned it.

Lol comparing cryptocurrency with pokémon card is new level of... uh creative but not very bright perspective.

OK let us pretend Pokécard has some crypographically proven properties that makes it useful as currency.

Pokecard as a coin is speculative only when compared with fiat; one coin is one coin and its value stays in term of its utilities.

Regardless, further reading is usually very useful before forming strong opinion.

(1) I would argue speculative assets is a concrete use case which is a pros, it's for capital gain. Anyway, your speculative-as'a cons argument crumbles as soon as stablecoin is mentioned. Stablecoin is pegged to stable fiat.

(2) Deflation and inflation mechanism of cryptocurrency varies differently on each coin. BTC itself inflationary by nature due to its halving mechanism. Other coins may have same or diffrent approach.

By now I hope you would see the benefit of forming informed opinion: there are a lot types of Pokécard—I mean cryptocurrencies, reading few sentence about BTC does not mean it encompasses all cryptocurrency . ;)

Finally, since you are so obsessed with cryptocurrency as a way to subvert govt: it's only one of use case.

Stellar or Cardano (I forget) aims to be backbone for scalable, and cheap payment network, Ethereum is not only a currency, it has smart contract that allows you execute your program. Those has zero thing to do with a working govt or not.

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

Some of us would quite like to see the end of the personal motorcar.

Cars are generally useful and enable modern life.

Crypto has yet to prove that level of value.

And rational approach is minimize the amount of cars on the road. Contrary to cryptos, there are certain applications where cars don't have real alternatives - like deliveries to small shops and restaurants, or for tradesman.

Cryptocurrency is an alternative to centralized parties that abuse their monopoly positions as payment platforms while non-profit/government sectors are too inept to provide a public payment option.

Here's a case of PayPal closing the account of a user because they used it to fund servers to run TOR nodes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/paypal-shuts-down-long...

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.

People don't risk angering national governments and shutting down economies for fun. They do it either for ideology or money, and the former motivation makes it difficult to staff up a talented cracking team.

Wire has KYC requirements

People who want to ban cryptocurrency will be using this as an excuse and scare tactic to get what they want.

Maybe we should ban _paying_ the ransoms instead?

That sounds a lot like Sweden's approach to prostitution, where the clients are punishable but sex workers aren't. The result is sex workers are less safe than they are in countries where prostitution is legal or decriminalised, but the sex market is otherwise undiminished.

It also sounds like how many countries handle drugs, where possession is criminalised but somehow the consumption of drugs doesn't decrease.

Shouldn't we be talking about what actually works?

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.

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