I mean they just proved that they are willing to pay the ransom. If they are also unwilling or unable to clean up their shop and keep it from happening again, it surely will.
As soon as this occurs, ransomware events will collapse since the ransoms will become unpayable.
The negatives of cryptocurrencies (ransomware enablement, chip and electricity shortages, scams) clearly outweigh the positives at this point.
And I'm sure they'd just invent or go back to some other method -- possibly riskier and more violent -- so they can continue to ransom money from people.
The effect would not come from the criminals being able to cash out, it would come from the company not being able to cash in. If cryptocurrency were to be banned and public exchanges were closed purchasing cryptocurrency to the tune of millions of dollars worth becomes practically impossible for a regular company without connections in the space. If the company is not able to pay the ransom, the entire venture is pointless.
> And I'm sure they'd just invent or go back to some other method -- possibly riskier and more violent -- so they can continue to ransom money from people.
Sure, there will be other methods of transferring some amount of money. To the tune of millions of dollars, though? Unlikely. Cryptocurrency enables these companies to pay ransoms of this amount. Without cryptocurrency you might be able to ask for a 50K ransom instead of a 5M ransom, but that reduces your payout by 100X. 5M is enough to retire from. 50K is less than the yearly wage these people can make.
It's not like ransomware didn't exist before cryptocurrency, we know what ransomware without cryptocurrency looks like. What cryptocurrency changed is the scale of the payout. Instead of getting a few thousand dollars in gift cards the hackers are now rewarded with millions in bitcoins. It is hard to deny that the change in incentives caused by cryptocurrency is the primary driver behind the huge increase in ransomware attacks in the last few years.
Sure, it would be more difficult if crypto is illegal, but I think because of the difficulty of getting it, crypto prices would skyrocket.
Everyone will also move to using the privacy coins too. So, banning crypto might actually be beneficial for it as it would incentivise crypto projects to improve privacy and decentralization even more.
A ban won't stop people from using it or developing it in their homes.
Sure, nowhere in my post do I deny that an underground market won't exist. In fact, I directly hint to the fact that it will exist. What matters for this problem is how easy it is to buy $X million worth of bitcoins for a company. Currently this is easy. If you have $X million in your bank account, you can go to one of these exchanges and buy $X million worth of bitcoin.
With the exchanges shut down, how would a company buy $X million worth of bitcoin? Where do they go? How do they not get scammed while doing so? It's not like companies can easily move $X million to another country where it would be legal to buy crypto either. After all, if they could move money in a bank that easily, crypto would not be required at all for the purpose of ransomware. They could just move the $X million directly! People use crypto for ransomware because it is not so easy to move money of this magnitude.
> Sure, it would be more difficult if crypto is illegal, but I think because of the difficulty of getting it, crypto prices would skyrocket.
That seems unlikely. A bank run seems the most likely scenario with a massive drop in price being the result, even if only a few high-impact regions would make it illegal (e.g. the US and EU). Regular people and large investors would cash out almost immediately upon hearing the news. Why would regular people want to own an illegal currency that they cannot trade for anything besides maybe drugs on the black market?
The reason the majority of people own crypto now is not because of the utility - it is because there are legal crypto exchanges that they can use to trade them back to the actual currency that they use (generally dollars or euros). If people have to go through illegal networks in order to perform these exchanges (and remember, exchanges for fiat money would be illegal and hence risky) the entire value proposition is lost.
> Everyone will also move to using the privacy coins too. So, banning crypto might actually be beneficial for it as it would incentivise crypto projects to improve privacy and decentralization even more.
I wouldn't even propose banning cryptocurrencies entirely. Shutting down the exchanges and banning the trade of cryptocurrency for fiat seems more than sufficient for this purpose. Cryptocurrencies can continue to exist on their own and perhaps find a use/purpose of their own. The back-and-forth exchange for fiat is what is problematic.
This might even be good for cryptocurrencies as a platform, as the focus would shift back to the underlying technology and its use cases rather than the investor crowd that doesn't give a shit about the technology and only cares about making a quick buck.
Sure, there would be an initial bank runk, but a ban would also have unintended consequences such as making coins more scarce, thus unintentionally driving speculative demand and cause people to turn to the black market, especially if there are bank runs on fiat itself (I know, extremist, but you never know - I've personally eyewitnessed a national currency imploding once).
> This might even be good for cryptocurrencies as a platform
I guess we have something we agree on. Also a ban would encourage more activism and push cryptocurrencies to their full potential (of side-stepping the bans by going to fully decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer) and weed out a lot of the snake oil in the space.
Do I see a ban to be successful for what what it intends to do? Maybe temporarily, but in the long term it will fail and backfire.
It's like nobody has learned a thing from the war on drugs, my point being: you deal with the root cause of the disease (infosec in most companies and even government offices is a joke and bad people have taken notice), not playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms (crypto use) that hint towards systemic decay.
If the goal is to stop companies from paying ransom, then why not just make that illegal?
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
There's just no other form of payment which would work for them. You can't easily go "can I have $50k worth of giftcards" and on the receiving side you can't easily validate or sell millions of them without tanking the value. Any kind of wire transfer would expose the source immediately at that scale. There's only so much money you can move through services that give you kickbacks of various kinds. What else is left?
Basically unless ransomware teams know of a new really good way of laundering money without a trail, or are happy to take a massive pay cut, that would be the end of most of their operations.
Money grows on trees, there, too.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you made crypto illegal, there's still a whole lot of countries that won't give a shit and the problem will only get worse.
All these situations are nebulous and complicated, something as simple as legally banning crypto is not going to solve the problems.