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Bitcoin is aggressively used in dark net, drug dealing, zero day exploit selling, and is used by nationstates to hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors t

Bitcoin is aggressively used in dark net, drug dealing, zero day exploit selling, and is used by nationstates to hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's and governments. There was a period when people erroneously thought that bitcoin was anonymous and secure. If the NSA was not working to track down the premiere currency of the dark web and of the nation state actors they work counterintelligence against, this would be dereliction of their duty. This is like suggesting the FBI tracks down "USD" users. No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use. Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.

sbenitoj 9y ago
“Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.” Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto. Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.
- portofcall 9y ago
  Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto. Number 1 by volume (duh) or number 1 by percentage of transactions for illegal goods and services? Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history. You hear that atomic energy, antibiotics and computers?
  - sbenitoj 9y ago
    Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people. Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution. Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply. Here’s a good place to start: The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin Theory of Money and Credit by Mises All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.
    - mythrwy 9y ago
      I agree with your thesis on the importance of the invention. More abstract (and international) money and blockchain rules will be huge advances, fully agreed. Less corruption, more stability, these things I believe will finally allow us to set systems up to provide resources with efficiency we haven't been able to before and this is huge. Where I get off is is thinking it's some kind of libertarian revolution wresting control from the hands of government. I don't predict that. The way I see it, governments will be in the thick of it. But they (hopefully) will finally have to play by the rules.
      - sbenitoj 9y ago
        They’re definitely already in the thick of it, no doubt about it. But ultimately capital goes where it is treated best, and governments treat capital worse than thieves, they’ll never play by the rules. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to be a really rocky road, but eventually worldwide governments will not be in control over money anymore. Now that people don’t have to use fiat that is debased on purpose by governments to fund their operations, they will not. It’s not about a libertarian revolution (although I do believe sound money will result in a more libertarian world), it’s about sound money being an order of magnitude more superior to fiat. People in Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic didn’t stop using debased currency because they were libertarians, they stopped because it was clear their money was becoming worthless and there were superior alternatives. Those are extreme examples where it can happen overnight, it will take longer for less aggressive regimes, but it’s only a matter of time before the same happens to all other fiat.
        mythrwy 9y ago
        Agreed. Over time I do see that happening. An objective international financial system to which nation states acquiesce or are locked out and rapidly decline.
  - sbenitoj 9y ago
    Don’t know why my post got flagged, I provided several valuable resources, going to post it again, exactly as written. ————— Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people. Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution. Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply. Here’s a good place to start: The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin Theory of Money and Credit by Mises All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.
- jandrese 9y ago
  > Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history. Dude, lay off of the Kool-Aid.
  - sbenitoj 9y ago
    You don’t consider sound money to be an important innovation?
    - jandrese 9y ago
      It is, but we were talking about blockchain currencies.
      - sbenitoj 9y ago
        You don’t believe blockcbain currencies can be a form of sound money? What do you think can? (Not trying to argue, genuinely curious).
        jandrese 9y ago
        Fiat currencies seem to be doing a decent job of it, and they don't require the terawatts of power a crypto currency would need if it were adopted as a primary currency of a major country.
wongarsu 9y ago
>No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use I mostly agree with you, but I find this statement odd. There's obviously some regulation that is helpful to law enforcement and counterintelligence (money laundering regulation comes to mind, which you can't even really get around by using BTC). But crime and intelligence operations have a long history of working around those regulations, and both law enforcements and counterintelligence seem to cope just fine.
stagbeetle 9y ago
Thank Satoshi we have Monero et al. Although we might run into the same problem as regular drug dealers: only the idiots get caught, i.e only the ones using BTC/non-cryptonote get caught.
buildbuildbuild 9y ago
The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue. Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do? Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.
- ttul 9y ago
  We aren’t talking about domestic surveillance here. The supposed privacy tool was foreign-targeted. This is NSA’s legit mission.
  - coldacid 9y ago
    Are you really so innocent as to believe that the NSA was _only_ targeting foreign Bitcoin holders, or that they made effort at least to avoid capturing info on Americans?
    - ttul 9y ago
      Perhaps back in 2013 they were not so careful to avoid collection on Americans. But now they certainly are. Nobody wants to go to jail.
      - marssaxman 9y ago
        Why would they be afraid of going to jail? None of them have gone to jail so far. You only face consequences for reporting misbehavior, not for engaging in it.
    - willstrafach 9y ago
      That's the law, no reason to think otherwise without evidence. I assume the story would be very different if there was any indication this was used on US citizens.
secfirstmd 9y ago
>>>>hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's Woah, can you give some sources on Bitcoin being used to pay for attacking NGOs? Do you mean DDoS or do you have specific links on that?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ojr 9y ago
bitcoin is a horrible currency to do drug deals, the most infamous dark net site, Silk Road was doing $15 million annually at its peak, compare that to the 400 billion illegal drug industry that is mostly transacted with cash. Currently the primary use for bitcoin is speculation. Nation states will hire and pay with cash without the blockchain trail... There was a period of people speculating on a currency whose money supply is controlled by open source software and maintainers and it is still happening.
- root_axis 9y ago
  Why would you even bother making the comparison between the sum of all black market drug activity on the planet and a single niche website hidden behind tor?
  - ojr 9y ago
    I was trying to explain how small bitcoin is compared to the sum of all black market activity by using an example of one the most profitable bitcoin dark market to date
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> dark net, drug dealing These are law enforcement things. The NSA should not be deployed against drug dealers. > zero day exploit selling This is squarely within the NSA's purview. Also North Korea [1]. More broadly, Bitcoin takes cash-like transactions and posts them in a unified computer-friendly database. Of course it will be mined for insights. Even collating U.S. dollar transactions involves querying multiple financial institutions, each who hold their data in various formats. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-korea-s-bitcoin-play https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-kor...
- solotronics 9y ago
  if the government is collecting data that another department can use you bet they are sharing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
thathappened 9y ago
After learning about the war on drugs being a ploy to build up the gun and law enforcement markets. I wondered if Bitcoin was created by the us to launder and fund projects while still maintaining control over the majority of it and possibly use to collapse other currencies and governments. They already print cash so we know the anonymous currency isn't frowned upon and the only banned Venezuela crypto none of the other seeming shady coins.

sbenitoj 9y ago

“Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.” Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto. Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

portofcall 9y ago
Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto. Number 1 by volume (duh) or number 1 by percentage of transactions for illegal goods and services? Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history. You hear that atomic energy, antibiotics and computers?
- sbenitoj 9y ago
  Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people. Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution. Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply. Here’s a good place to start: The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin Theory of Money and Credit by Mises All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    I agree with your thesis on the importance of the invention. More abstract (and international) money and blockchain rules will be huge advances, fully agreed. Less corruption, more stability, these things I believe will finally allow us to set systems up to provide resources with efficiency we haven't been able to before and this is huge. Where I get off is is thinking it's some kind of libertarian revolution wresting control from the hands of government. I don't predict that. The way I see it, governments will be in the thick of it. But they (hopefully) will finally have to play by the rules.
    - sbenitoj 9y ago
      They’re definitely already in the thick of it, no doubt about it. But ultimately capital goes where it is treated best, and governments treat capital worse than thieves, they’ll never play by the rules. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to be a really rocky road, but eventually worldwide governments will not be in control over money anymore. Now that people don’t have to use fiat that is debased on purpose by governments to fund their operations, they will not. It’s not about a libertarian revolution (although I do believe sound money will result in a more libertarian world), it’s about sound money being an order of magnitude more superior to fiat. People in Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic didn’t stop using debased currency because they were libertarians, they stopped because it was clear their money was becoming worthless and there were superior alternatives. Those are extreme examples where it can happen overnight, it will take longer for less aggressive regimes, but it’s only a matter of time before the same happens to all other fiat.
      - mythrwy 9y ago
        Agreed. Over time I do see that happening. An objective international financial system to which nation states acquiesce or are locked out and rapidly decline.
- sbenitoj 9y ago
  Don’t know why my post got flagged, I provided several valuable resources, going to post it again, exactly as written. ————— Yes, sound money is on par with both of those. Fiat money has indirectly killed more people than the lack of antibiotics ever did. Fiat is what gives corrupt governments like the USSR and China under Mao (and their modern, less corrupt equivalents) the ability to control an entire economy to the detriment of billions of people. Once control over money is finally wrestled from the hands of the elite the world will see a boom in prosperity that hasn’t been seen since the industrial revolution. Read some books, educate yourself on how important this topic is rather than posting a snarky reply. Here’s a good place to start: The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin Theory of Money and Credit by Mises All are available for free online by searching for the PDF version.
jandrese 9y ago
> Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history. Dude, lay off of the Kool-Aid.
- sbenitoj 9y ago
  You don’t consider sound money to be an important innovation?
  - jandrese 9y ago
    It is, but we were talking about blockchain currencies.
    - sbenitoj 9y ago
      You don’t believe blockcbain currencies can be a form of sound money? What do you think can? (Not trying to argue, genuinely curious).
      - jandrese 9y ago
        Fiat currencies seem to be doing a decent job of it, and they don't require the terawatts of power a crypto currency would need if it were adopted as a primary currency of a major country.

wongarsu 9y ago

>No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use I mostly agree with you, but I find this statement odd. There's obviously some regulation that is helpful to law enforcement and counterintelligence (money laundering regulation comes to mind, which you can't even really get around by using BTC). But crime and intelligence operations have a long history of working around those regulations, and both law enforcements and counterintelligence seem to cope just fine.

stagbeetle 9y ago

Thank Satoshi we have Monero et al. Although we might run into the same problem as regular drug dealers: only the idiots get caught, i.e only the ones using BTC/non-cryptonote get caught.

buildbuildbuild 9y ago

The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue. Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do? Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.

ttul 9y ago
We aren’t talking about domestic surveillance here. The supposed privacy tool was foreign-targeted. This is NSA’s legit mission.
- coldacid 9y ago
  Are you really so innocent as to believe that the NSA was _only_ targeting foreign Bitcoin holders, or that they made effort at least to avoid capturing info on Americans?
  - ttul 9y ago
    Perhaps back in 2013 they were not so careful to avoid collection on Americans. But now they certainly are. Nobody wants to go to jail.
    - marssaxman 9y ago
      Why would they be afraid of going to jail? None of them have gone to jail so far. You only face consequences for reporting misbehavior, not for engaging in it.
  - willstrafach 9y ago
    That's the law, no reason to think otherwise without evidence. I assume the story would be very different if there was any indication this was used on US citizens.

secfirstmd 9y ago

>>>>hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's Woah, can you give some sources on Bitcoin being used to pay for attacking NGOs? Do you mean DDoS or do you have specific links on that?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ojr 9y ago

bitcoin is a horrible currency to do drug deals, the most infamous dark net site, Silk Road was doing $15 million annually at its peak, compare that to the 400 billion illegal drug industry that is mostly transacted with cash. Currently the primary use for bitcoin is speculation. Nation states will hire and pay with cash without the blockchain trail... There was a period of people speculating on a currency whose money supply is controlled by open source software and maintainers and it is still happening.

root_axis 9y ago
Why would you even bother making the comparison between the sum of all black market drug activity on the planet and a single niche website hidden behind tor?
- ojr 9y ago
  I was trying to explain how small bitcoin is compared to the sum of all black market activity by using an example of one the most profitable bitcoin dark market to date

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> dark net, drug dealing These are law enforcement things. The NSA should not be deployed against drug dealers. > zero day exploit selling This is squarely within the NSA's purview. Also North Korea [1]. More broadly, Bitcoin takes cash-like transactions and posts them in a unified computer-friendly database. Of course it will be mined for insights. Even collating U.S. dollar transactions involves querying multiple financial institutions, each who hold their data in various formats. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-korea-s-bitcoin-play https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-kor...

solotronics 9y ago
if the government is collecting data that another department can use you bet they are sharing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

thathappened 9y ago

After learning about the war on drugs being a ploy to build up the gun and law enforcement markets. I wondered if Bitcoin was created by the us to launder and fund projects while still maintaining control over the majority of it and possibly use to collapse other currencies and governments. They already print cash so we know the anonymous currency isn't frowned upon and the only banned Venezuela crypto none of the other seeming shady coins.