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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
In 2013 I was able to pay for something internationally once with Bitcoin when the merchant's credit card processor couldn't handle my credit card. With the price of transactions not maybe that's now practical, but that's one possible application.
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.
I use legal crypto I paid taxes for, for everyday purchases, because it's faster and has lower fees than most alternatives (assuming non micro payments). Most relevant coins and tokens are not mined (anymore) and also bitcoin mining will end.
Just because it has no use for you does not mean it's only bad for the whole society.
How about we don't dogmatically prohibit other adults from engaging in some class of voluntary interactions with each other. And singling out one non-essential activity for a ban, because it consumes electricity, is unprecendented. It's nothing more than using environmental concerns as a pretense to stamp out an activity you personally don't like for other reasons.
As for what they've delivered for society, I admit it's still mostly just limited to speculation, but real promise is now being shown, in the following ways:
* hundreds of millions of people potentially being empowered to earn income by sharing in the revenue their social media content generates, via community currencies, like the /r/CryptoCurrency ERC20 token, Moon [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
* people living under repressive governments being able to escape their capital controls and survive [6]
>>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.
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.
We are at a very interesting junction. Cryptocurrency was created to solve a very real problem. Our current monetary system is badly broken and there's really nothing stopping a repeat of 2008. Layers upon layers of legislation only serve to further complicate and mystify the world of finance leading to more and more wasted resources trying to keep this thing going.
But cryptocurrency in its current form has failed to deliver. It's the closest thing we have to trustless digital money, but it's still quite far. But should we give up on it entirely?
If cryptocurrency gets banned now then that's it. No chance for improvements to be made. We're stuck with either bank money or government money for the foreseeable future. It will be just like the war on drugs which halted all medical research into drugs which are probably very useful. I don't think that would be a good thing. It would just give more power to banks.
It is surprising looking at the comments. Schooling definitely does not mean educated. I can't think of a worse thing than the federal reserve and fractional banking but let's be scared of crypto-currencies?
But some of these comments are beyond understanding.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 3653 ms ] threadBefore 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.
Do you agree that banning it would make the problem smaller?
Yeah sure it will make the problem 'smaller', but do you see the interesting lapse of logic there?
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).
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!
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.
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.
Crypto has yet to prove that level of value.
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...
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.
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."
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.
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“.
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).
Maybe we should ban _paying_ the ransoms instead?
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?
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.
To fight poor people saving to escape de-facto slavery, we need to ban paper money.
To fight flatulence, we shall ban vegetables.
That seems like an appeal to authority!
Someone pays their research grants jobs etc. That someone has a central banking system to preserve.
To fight ransoms, we need to ban cash, gold and diamonds.
This is absolutely absurd in its reckless narrowmindedness. My previous comment on cryptocurrency and ransomware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27232781
- Ransomware
- Pump and dump scams
- Enriching a tiny group of early speculators at the expense of average retail gamblers
- Burning a huge amount of energy
- Wasting a huge amount of processing power and hardware
- Leading to shortages of computer chips
- Enabling Iran etc. to evade sanctions
- Contributing to power blackouts
- Money laundering
- Tax evasion
- Wasting a huge amount of human talent for essentially no purpose
Its necessary to ban the purchase of these coins in the West, for the good of our civilization.
As soon as people could reliably but online, States suddenly grew balls and started legalising...
Also, plenty of us have zero objections to Iran dodging our bullshit sanctions...
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.
Yes.
>something that cannot be stopped by governments?
No.
I see this as an absolute win.
Just because it has no use for you does not mean it's only bad for the whole society.
As for what they've delivered for society, I admit it's still mostly just limited to speculation, but real promise is now being shown, in the following ways:
* hundreds of millions of people potentially being empowered to earn income by sharing in the revenue their social media content generates, via community currencies, like the /r/CryptoCurrency ERC20 token, Moon [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
* people living under repressive governments being able to escape their capital controls and survive [6]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9dye7/i_so...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kqrikd/sold...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/n371id/how_...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ly79uw/as_a...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/l9bdtn/guys...
[6] https://twitter.com/Codiox/status/1375876968390909956
No, as long as it has drastic side effects that affect others.
>hundreds of millions of people potentially being empowered
Poe's law strikes here hard.
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.
But cryptocurrency in its current form has failed to deliver. It's the closest thing we have to trustless digital money, but it's still quite far. But should we give up on it entirely?
If cryptocurrency gets banned now then that's it. No chance for improvements to be made. We're stuck with either bank money or government money for the foreseeable future. It will be just like the war on drugs which halted all medical research into drugs which are probably very useful. I don't think that would be a good thing. It would just give more power to banks.
But some of these comments are beyond understanding.