Just responding to each of the points, rather than the whole argument from the thread:
> Well not Steve Wynn personally but I mean how do you think the Somali pirates got paid? They literally airlifted them cash.
Again, cash is not an option for the scale of the operation that modern ransomware represents. According to a United Nations-backed report, Somali pirates made between $339 million and $413 million in ransom profits between 2005 and 2012. The highest ransom on record was $13.5 million, paid in April 2011. It should be noted that in 2011, Bitcoin's price rose to $32 on June 8, but then plummeted to $0.01 within a few days. The price of Bitcoin peaked at $30 in June 2011, but then dropped to $5. Bitcoin finished the year at $4.70. Not exactly a viable alternative at that time.
Now compare those 8 years to any recent year's ransomware take. "Total ransomware revenue fell to at least $456.8 million in 2022, down nearly 40% from the $765.6 million extracted from victims in 2021."
But ok, back to the present: are you suggesting that a US company would/should/could just charter a flight into Russia? That everyone, including the US and Russian government, knows has millions of dollars of cash sitting on-board? And you think this wouldn't hit any snags? If you have an above board way to solve this then there are a number of cartels would love to hire you. Hell, not even the ransomware gangs would be comfortable with this arrangement, as bigger crime syndicates with better connections to the Russian state would be all but guaranteed to intercept the flight. And good luck getting the US government's blessing to send cash into a place like North Korea, who is very active in the ransomware space.
> SWIFT will absolutely transfer the funds; social engineering to receive wires you're not supposed to is a lucrative crime (i.e. "CEO Wire Fraud").
Does SWIFT accept applications from known ransomware gangs? What about accepting applications from fly-by-night operations located in former Soviet states with no institutional history? Don't be ridiculous.
And how does stealing funds being sent to someone else help you when you are trying to get funds sent directly to you? Are you suggesting that MGM would collude with the ransomware gangs to send funds via SWIFT to a 3rd party, such that the gang would be expected to intercept them thus satisfying the ransom? Or are you suggesting that SWIFT would knowingly transfer money intended for cybercriminals to some 3rd party, with the expectation that the gang would intercept the funds? This is just getting silly.
> VISA probably just won't because they'll find a transaction of that much with no collateral as a huge risk.
Visa won't because they aren't going to risk their business with functioning governments to collect some transaction fees to do work for known criminals doing public crime.
> I'd rather trace a difficult to track currency with a public ledger (BitCoin) than an impossible to track currency without a public ledger (USD).
Not sure what the point of this statement is, except that it seems to buttress the text you didn't copy, namely "Crypto and ransomware are absolutely intertwined in 2023, and have been for well over a decade", which is about as non-controversial as they come. As an aside though, plenty of organizations actually have a lot of success tracking that "impossible to track currency without a public ledger (USD)". In fact, here is some information about tracking the cash given to Somali pirates: https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/02/world/africa/horn-of-africa-p...
Cheers.