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I'd like to hear how cryptocurrency advocates address this without deploying a fallacy. Cryptocurrency makes ransomware possible, without the former, the latter

I'd like to hear how cryptocurrency advocates address this without deploying a fallacy. Cryptocurrency makes ransomware possible, without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses I usually hear come in the form of "current banking facilitates bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but doesn't absolve cryptocurrencies central role in ransomware. As the article states, there is simply no way to pay a ransom without cryptocurrency. Maybe they could do b2b or cash, but that would be sooooo bold (but not impossible?) EDIT: See link from user 'px43' below about the history of ransomware. Good read. Predates cryptocurrency, but I think banking technology would make most payment strategies of the past impossible, like the original article argues (e.g., PO Box in Panama is quoted as a 1989 payment plan, but GP article explains that is harder due to extradition of data and logs).

J5892 5y ago
The answer is that sometimes progress comes with a cost. Whether or not you consider cryptocurrencies "progress" is irrelevant, because it's an emerging technology that exists whether you (or I) like it or not. The cold, hard, unavoidable truth is this: Ransomware may be a Bitcoin problem, and it may not be. Either way, tough shit.
- verdverm 5y ago
  How does this compare to banning ICE vehicles? They are widely adopted and useful, yet their secondary harms warrant laws to be written.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  > Whether or not you consider cryptocurrencies "progress" is irrelevant I mean not really. If we were to decide, as a country, that it was bad, we could take actions to stop its proliferation. The dollar-BTC transition points are chokepoints we could easily target to get started.
  - devonbleak 5y ago
    Money laundering is also illegal and it's still prolific. Buying weed is also illegal and it's still prolific. Banning things like this just turns them into another laundering opportunity - where there's money to be made there's a way.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      If I take this claim literally it's never worth having any kind of law at all. I don't believe that. I also don't think crypto currency looks nearly as attractive if there are no legitimate channels to convert or spend it.
  - Zednivat 5y ago
    I just want to be sure we're on the same page. Is the full version of that: "If we were to decide, as a country, that it was bad, we could assign new orders to our federal, state, and local law enforcements officers to target and violate the property rights of people who engage with cryptocurrencies"? In order to solve the ransomware problem, we create a new problem in the use of violence or the threat of violence in order to stop anyone from using crypto at all.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm not an anarchist, so I am indeed advocating that the state use its power to achieve societal benefits, which is ultimately, one might say, backed by its monopoly on the use of violence. Property rights are not and should not be absolute.
toxik 5y ago
Cash enables muggings so we must ban cash?
- Raed667 5y ago
  Ask someone younger than 20 if they have more than 10$ cash on them.
- tptacek 5y ago
  We don't have a huge mugging problem. We have muggings (I've been mugged), but they occur infrequently enough that society isn't disrupted. You can't say that about ransomware. Not only that, but we have done things to defang muggings; for instance, it's been made less lucrative (and more dangerous for the mugger) to steal a modern phone.
  - toxik 5y ago
    But that’s not what decides if cash is viable. If we had a huge mugging problem, we would call for better law enforcement, not less cash.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      No, people generally carry much less cash now, and part of the reason why is that it's so easily stolen.
      - devonbleak 5y ago
        I'd argue that's a small part of the reason. Like a rounding error vs the inconvenience factor of dealing with stuff like coins, having to go to a physical location during restrictive hours/days to obtain more than a trivial amount of cash, etc.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  you say this in jest but in reality plenty of people have stopped using cash by themselves for this exact reason.
Dah00n 5y ago
I'm not a cryptocurrency advocate but as arberx points out in another comment this is avoiding the real problem. The problem isn't cryptocurrency or ransomware. The root cause is what needs to be fixed: Software publishers and software owners are to blame for insecure systems. Software development is like the wild west with absolutely no accountability. This need to change.
- meowface 5y ago
  It's one cause, but in my opinion the root here is the fact that ransomers are frequently identified but brazenly don't skip a beat even if they get publicly doxed, because they know they'll face no repercussions. Their governments turn a blind eye as long as the victims aren't citizens of the country or closely allied countries.
- tptacek 5y ago
  There is no evidence at all that computer science and information technology actually knows how to solve the underlying security problems without forcing untenable compromises on the economy. We can produce secure software, but only at a level of expense and time that would preclude most commercial software development.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    That may be but that doesn't change that fact that the underlying problem isn't cryptocurrency. Lashing out at other technologies because of lack of accountability in software development won't solve anything. At best it will move it somewhere else but in the end the problem stil haven't been solved. Besides, software could absolutely be made much safer without destroying the economy. We all know that the systems that get hit are often a mess a twelve year old could "hack" by using specific search engines or kiddy scripts. Laws punishing those that run software with known vulnerabilities that end up causing society problems like these ransomware attacks do should have been made decades ago.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      The whole point of the article is that you could have said the same thing about Viagra spam, but financial system interventions did shut that down. There is, again, no evidence that we know how to make commercially deployed software meaningfully safer at the scale we need to do it at to stop ransomware attacks from disrupting society.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Before cryptocurrency it was iTunes giftcards or money transfer services to a 3rd world country. Cryptocurrency is not the only way to transfer money that’s relatively hard to trace.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Good point. But that's a lot of giftcards to transfer $5 million, let alone the $100MM claimed-size of the ransomware market from the article.
- tptacek 5y ago
  As the article points out, it's the only way to reliably transfer the 7 figure sums that make large-scale ransomware attacks workable.
  - beaner 5y ago
    Maybe the problem is the internet. Without that, critical infrastructure would not be susceptible to cyberattack.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      We successfully attacked critical infrastructure before it was connected to the Internet, so perhaps the problem is simply telecommunications. I think it's cryptocurrency, though.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Sorry but before cryptocurrency there also were hostage that were freed on payment of millions. For that kind of money life does find a way.
saurik 5y ago
""" While we're at it, maybe those same people can defend the Internet, right? Clearly, this experiment in anyone in the world being able to nigh unto anonymously communicate with anyone else was a mistake... at best, every packet should be tracked back to some regulated endpoint that can be tracked in the real world. The Internet, after all, makes the dark web--and its myriad crimes, including ransomware, drug trafficking, and illegal porn--possible: without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses we usually hear come in the form "prior telephone and postal systems facilitated bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but one that doesn't absolute the Internet, either. :/ """ ^ What you sound like to me. Like, I honestly just don't understand your point: these currencies (minus Bitcoin, due to proof of work being a bit ridiculous) seem like a very useful tool that you couldn't really ban anyway without taking ridiculously draconian measures (a la China and the open Internet, which is only barely working for them anyway) as--and this is kind of the whole point--there isn't any central actor running or maintaining it.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  The obvious difference to me is that the Internet has a lot of benefits outweighing the negatives beyond just enabling people to do speculation.
  - saurik 5y ago
    What, pray tell, are those benefits that are so obvious to you, and why should they only apply to photos of your lunch and not money? Most of the more "banal" uses of the Internet would still work fine with a tightly regulated system that required you to sign up for services with an ID and have every packet signed and tracked. The reality is that many in the US believe we had an insurrection attempt in January due to 8chan of all things. To me, sure: it is certainly "obvious" that the ability to have speech that isn't centrally controlled is a good thing... but I can't come up with a single argument for it that wouldn't also apply to being able to send money between two parties (and, notably, in the Western world we tend to purposefully conflate "speech" with the ability to transfer and lend resources, as without capital nothing can be accomplished).
swiley 5y ago
Ransomware existed before cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency was popular to the degree that it was widely abused before ransomware became a serious issue. They're related but probably not to the degree you think.
lancemurdock 5y ago
car accidents account for 38K deaths a year in the US alone. If we ban cars, we'd be saving 38K lives every year. Why do people continue driving knowing this statistic? The conversations around ransomware and climate are both slippery slopes. We should be focused on better security to prevent attacks as well as facilitating more renewable energy instead of stifling innovation.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Is the claim that cryptocurrency is providing a societal benefit comparable to the automobile then?
  - quanticle 5y ago
    Not yet, but it might. Early cars were noisy, slow, finicky and far more polluting than cars today. They're only as useful as they are today because they were allowed to evolve for a hundred and twenty years. Banning Bitcoin because it's used in cybercrime is analogous to banning the Model T because it got used in a bank robbery.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      It's much more akin to if a competitor to Ford made a car with a bank-robbing feature.
      - fsociety 5y ago
        If Bitcoin had a bank-robbing feature all transactions and wallets would be private. They aren’t.
        thehappypm 5y ago
        Which wallets aren’t private?
  - lancemurdock 5y ago
Miner49er 5y ago
I don't think you'll ever be able to fully ban cryptocurrency. Also, I'm not even sure ransomware is a net bad thing in the first place. It encourages better security and makes companies less likely to store my private information.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  If the G7 banned crypto trading, even if ransomware hackers wanted to be paid in crypto, companies would be unable to do so without breaking the law, which would be untenable. The bottom would fall out. Yes, people in other countries could do it, but without major economies pumping in value, they're more of a curiosity. Which, maybe would be better.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    You don't need to ban crypto trading for that, you can just criminalize paying ransoms.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  You don't have to; it's only valuable because you can legally change it for real currency.
Mc_Big_G 5y ago
I'd like to hear how internet advocates address child pornography without deploying a fallacy. The internet makes child pornography possible, without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses I usually hear come in the form of "CD ROMs facilitate bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but doesn't absolve the internet's central role in child porn. As the article states, there is simply no way to attain child porn without the internet. Maybe they could do DVD or CD ROM, but that would be sooooo slow (but not impossible?)
px43 5y ago
Heh, what? Ransomware existed long before cryptocurrencies. Money laundering via ACH, SWIFT, stolen credit cards, gift cards, and all sorts of online payment systems like PayPal are still huge, no cryptocurrencies required. Cryptocurrencies are used today because they're the most efficient way to make online payments, which is a net positive for everyone. It's just as easy to hunt down criminals using cryptocurrencies as it was to hunt online criminals before cryptocurrencies got popular. https://www.knowbe4.com/ransomware https://www.knowbe4.com/ransomware
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  This is enlightening. The 1989 ransomware that had a PO Box in Panama is hilarious. Really? Panama? Good point, thanks. However, opaque ledgers may make it difficult to hunt them down (Zcash, monero) in the future.
  - px43 5y ago
    Maybe companies will start enabling MFA by then? Kind of frustrating how easy it still is to break into critical infrastructure. I do that sort of thing regularly as my day job. Companies who put a slight effort into security don't get ransomwared. The idea that law enforcement needs full visibility into everyone's financial history, and that's the only way for them to stop crime, is ridiculous.
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      I think it also makes a convincing argument for bringing back on-site backups. If there are weekly/daily backups on local disks (tapes?) that are airgapped after backup, that would save exposing credentials to the cloud storage backups. Tape is dead, long live tape!
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I deeply disagree that crypto is the easiest way to make online payments. Have you ever used Venmo? Or even Facebook pay? Or Zelle? Sure, it might be the easiest way to send money cross-border, but that's an edge case, the vast, vast majority of transactions are same-country.
quanticle 5y ago
The problem isn't that Bitcoin enables hacking. The problem is, pardon my language, that our cybersecurity is absolute, utter unremediated shit. Every time a corporate PR press release uses the word "sophisticated" to refer to hackers, I roll my eyes. These hackers aren't using processor-level side channel attacks to read secrets out of memory. They're not using Rowhammer to alter encryption keys. They're doing basic things like, exploiting SQL injection. They're getting people with phishing. They're taking advantage of the fact that these giant corporations have willfully ignored every cybersecurity best practice for the past twenty years because it might cost them a few days worth of revenue to implement things like least-privilege access and two-factor authentication. Imagine a world where banks and businesses just kept their cash out on the counter, in unlocked boxes. One day, a bunch of "sophisticated" thieves come in and start grabbing the boxes and driving off. What is the logical response? 1. Ban cars 2. Ask banks and businesses to please use lockboxes and safes Both are solutions to the problem of thieves jumping in and grabbing cash. But I would submit that option 2 makes far more sense that option 1.
- quanticle 5y ago
  Just to follow up on the point, here's a Bloomberg piece that states that Colonial Pipeline was because they didn't use 2FA to secure their VPN, which allowed the hackers to compromise their network with a single cracked or sprayed password: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/hackers-breached-colonial-pipeline-using-compromised-password https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/hackers-b... In terms of security best practices, this ranks right up there with not leaving your keys in the ignition while you go shopping. This is the world in which we live: multimillion dollar corporations being either too cheap, incompetent, or lazy to issue RSA tokens, Yubikeys or phone-based TOTP for their VPNs. And somehow this is the fault of Bitcoin?
matthewmarkus 5y ago
The "problem" here is that a market for infrastructure bugs now exists. The birth of a market isn't a bad thing, though. Furthermore, the market hasn't created the bugs, but exposed them! This exposure is a net benefit to society because the bugs have value that predates the advent of cryptocurrencies. It's just that before cryptocurrencies the value was hidden and only unlockable by nation states in times of war. Far better for infrastructure to be continuously under attack and strengthened via ransomware than to completely collapse in battle.
onetimeusename 5y ago
I think creating a currency outside the reaches of politicians is the point, come what may. That isn't to say ransomware isn't bad, there are other obvious ways of stopping ransomware. The bigger point is that a financial system should not have a central authority who can limit access to it. Some cryptocurrencies have gone further and built privacy into the transactions also.
Black101 5y ago
You are another one of those that want no privacy for anyone...
mam3 5y ago
Independently of how you or I feel about it, crypro enables anonymous payment. This is a feature of anonymous payment not a bug.
Dove 5y ago
Meaningful freedoms always include the possibility of abusing those freedoms. People will use the free exchange of ideas to advocate for falsehoods, start cults, and create political movements with terrible consequences. But they also use it to make the world a better place. New ideas that have advanced us as a civilization have generally started out as subversive and the freedom that allows them to grow to widespread acceptance is important. While the abuses are awful, and we can try to make the specifically abusive aspects illegal, it's hard to fully separate the good from the evil. In the end, the freedom to change to world for good always entails the freedom to change it for evil, too. But at least in this area, historically, the big wins wipe out the big losses -- and even if they didn't, I still want the wins. This principle is true in almost every area of life. Strong encryption, for example, does help terrorists and cybercriminals, but it also helps revolutionaries and businessmen and ordinary citizens. I don't want to give too many examples because these things tend to be politically hot topics, and I don't want to distract from the central principle: meaningful freedoms can be abused, but are worth it because they also change the world. I would say this is the case with cryptocurrencies as well. It is true that they enable certain criminal economies. Perhaps some of those economies would still function without cryptocurrencies, and perhaps some -- as the article suggests -- would no longer be viable. But cryptocurriencies enable people to build any economy they like without the approval or supervision of a state. There are places where the government does sort of a terrible job managing its money, where this is a major benefit to people. There are people doing things unpopular with some company or some government, who can still do them practically because of the economies enabled by cryptocurrencies. These people are by nature pretty subversive, and a lot of them are doing things I do not like -- but some are doing things I am very glad they are still able to do. Freedom's like that. Some people use it for evil. Some people use it for good. And the difficulties we have in all agreeing on what's good and evil (and the particular difficulties big governments and corporations have in getting the answer to that question right!) are why I'll almost always side broadly with freedom. When people use bitcoin to do criminal things, I'm all for prosecuting them for the crimes -- but leave bitcoin alone. The ability of people to run an economy without the government's permission is something I really like them to have.
jude- 5y ago
This is an exchange and banking problem. Someone somewhere is allowing these terrorists to cash out. Find the bank (or country hosting it), cut them off from SWIFT, and apply sanctions until they stop funding terrorism. Cryptocurrency, like the Internet, is merely the medium.

J5892 5y ago

The answer is that sometimes progress comes with a cost. Whether or not you consider cryptocurrencies "progress" is irrelevant, because it's an emerging technology that exists whether you (or I) like it or not. The cold, hard, unavoidable truth is this: Ransomware may be a Bitcoin problem, and it may not be. Either way, tough shit.

verdverm 5y ago
How does this compare to banning ICE vehicles? They are widely adopted and useful, yet their secondary harms warrant laws to be written.
emodendroket 5y ago
> Whether or not you consider cryptocurrencies "progress" is irrelevant I mean not really. If we were to decide, as a country, that it was bad, we could take actions to stop its proliferation. The dollar-BTC transition points are chokepoints we could easily target to get started.
- devonbleak 5y ago
  Money laundering is also illegal and it's still prolific. Buying weed is also illegal and it's still prolific. Banning things like this just turns them into another laundering opportunity - where there's money to be made there's a way.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    If I take this claim literally it's never worth having any kind of law at all. I don't believe that. I also don't think crypto currency looks nearly as attractive if there are no legitimate channels to convert or spend it.
- Zednivat 5y ago
  I just want to be sure we're on the same page. Is the full version of that: "If we were to decide, as a country, that it was bad, we could assign new orders to our federal, state, and local law enforcements officers to target and violate the property rights of people who engage with cryptocurrencies"? In order to solve the ransomware problem, we create a new problem in the use of violence or the threat of violence in order to stop anyone from using crypto at all.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm not an anarchist, so I am indeed advocating that the state use its power to achieve societal benefits, which is ultimately, one might say, backed by its monopoly on the use of violence. Property rights are not and should not be absolute.

toxik 5y ago

Cash enables muggings so we must ban cash?

Raed667 5y ago
Ask someone younger than 20 if they have more than 10$ cash on them.
tptacek 5y ago
We don't have a huge mugging problem. We have muggings (I've been mugged), but they occur infrequently enough that society isn't disrupted. You can't say that about ransomware. Not only that, but we have done things to defang muggings; for instance, it's been made less lucrative (and more dangerous for the mugger) to steal a modern phone.
- toxik 5y ago
  But that’s not what decides if cash is viable. If we had a huge mugging problem, we would call for better law enforcement, not less cash.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    No, people generally carry much less cash now, and part of the reason why is that it's so easily stolen.
    - devonbleak 5y ago
      I'd argue that's a small part of the reason. Like a rounding error vs the inconvenience factor of dealing with stuff like coins, having to go to a physical location during restrictive hours/days to obtain more than a trivial amount of cash, etc.
endisneigh 5y ago
you say this in jest but in reality plenty of people have stopped using cash by themselves for this exact reason.

Dah00n 5y ago

I'm not a cryptocurrency advocate but as arberx points out in another comment this is avoiding the real problem. The problem isn't cryptocurrency or ransomware. The root cause is what needs to be fixed: Software publishers and software owners are to blame for insecure systems. Software development is like the wild west with absolutely no accountability. This need to change.

meowface 5y ago
It's one cause, but in my opinion the root here is the fact that ransomers are frequently identified but brazenly don't skip a beat even if they get publicly doxed, because they know they'll face no repercussions. Their governments turn a blind eye as long as the victims aren't citizens of the country or closely allied countries.
tptacek 5y ago
There is no evidence at all that computer science and information technology actually knows how to solve the underlying security problems without forcing untenable compromises on the economy. We can produce secure software, but only at a level of expense and time that would preclude most commercial software development.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  That may be but that doesn't change that fact that the underlying problem isn't cryptocurrency. Lashing out at other technologies because of lack of accountability in software development won't solve anything. At best it will move it somewhere else but in the end the problem stil haven't been solved. Besides, software could absolutely be made much safer without destroying the economy. We all know that the systems that get hit are often a mess a twelve year old could "hack" by using specific search engines or kiddy scripts. Laws punishing those that run software with known vulnerabilities that end up causing society problems like these ransomware attacks do should have been made decades ago.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The whole point of the article is that you could have said the same thing about Viagra spam, but financial system interventions did shut that down. There is, again, no evidence that we know how to make commercially deployed software meaningfully safer at the scale we need to do it at to stop ransomware attacks from disrupting society.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Before cryptocurrency it was iTunes giftcards or money transfer services to a 3rd world country. Cryptocurrency is not the only way to transfer money that’s relatively hard to trace.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
Good point. But that's a lot of giftcards to transfer $5 million, let alone the $100MM claimed-size of the ransomware market from the article.
tptacek 5y ago
As the article points out, it's the only way to reliably transfer the 7 figure sums that make large-scale ransomware attacks workable.
- beaner 5y ago
  Maybe the problem is the internet. Without that, critical infrastructure would not be susceptible to cyberattack.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    We successfully attacked critical infrastructure before it was connected to the Internet, so perhaps the problem is simply telecommunications. I think it's cryptocurrency, though.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Sorry but before cryptocurrency there also were hostage that were freed on payment of millions. For that kind of money life does find a way.

saurik 5y ago

""" While we're at it, maybe those same people can defend the Internet, right? Clearly, this experiment in anyone in the world being able to nigh unto anonymously communicate with anyone else was a mistake... at best, every packet should be tracked back to some regulated endpoint that can be tracked in the real world. The Internet, after all, makes the dark web--and its myriad crimes, including ransomware, drug trafficking, and illegal porn--possible: without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses we usually hear come in the form "prior telephone and postal systems facilitated bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but one that doesn't absolute the Internet, either. :/ """ ^ What you sound like to me. Like, I honestly just don't understand your point: these currencies (minus Bitcoin, due to proof of work being a bit ridiculous) seem like a very useful tool that you couldn't really ban anyway without taking ridiculously draconian measures (a la China and the open Internet, which is only barely working for them anyway) as--and this is kind of the whole point--there isn't any central actor running or maintaining it.

emodendroket 5y ago
The obvious difference to me is that the Internet has a lot of benefits outweighing the negatives beyond just enabling people to do speculation.
- saurik 5y ago
  What, pray tell, are those benefits that are so obvious to you, and why should they only apply to photos of your lunch and not money? Most of the more "banal" uses of the Internet would still work fine with a tightly regulated system that required you to sign up for services with an ID and have every packet signed and tracked. The reality is that many in the US believe we had an insurrection attempt in January due to 8chan of all things. To me, sure: it is certainly "obvious" that the ability to have speech that isn't centrally controlled is a good thing... but I can't come up with a single argument for it that wouldn't also apply to being able to send money between two parties (and, notably, in the Western world we tend to purposefully conflate "speech" with the ability to transfer and lend resources, as without capital nothing can be accomplished).

swiley 5y ago

Ransomware existed before cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency was popular to the degree that it was widely abused before ransomware became a serious issue. They're related but probably not to the degree you think.

lancemurdock 5y ago

car accidents account for 38K deaths a year in the US alone. If we ban cars, we'd be saving 38K lives every year. Why do people continue driving knowing this statistic? The conversations around ransomware and climate are both slippery slopes. We should be focused on better security to prevent attacks as well as facilitating more renewable energy instead of stifling innovation.

emodendroket 5y ago
Is the claim that cryptocurrency is providing a societal benefit comparable to the automobile then?
- quanticle 5y ago
  Not yet, but it might. Early cars were noisy, slow, finicky and far more polluting than cars today. They're only as useful as they are today because they were allowed to evolve for a hundred and twenty years. Banning Bitcoin because it's used in cybercrime is analogous to banning the Model T because it got used in a bank robbery.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It's much more akin to if a competitor to Ford made a car with a bank-robbing feature.
    - fsociety 5y ago
      If Bitcoin had a bank-robbing feature all transactions and wallets would be private. They aren’t.
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        Which wallets aren’t private?
- lancemurdock 5y ago

Miner49er 5y ago

I don't think you'll ever be able to fully ban cryptocurrency. Also, I'm not even sure ransomware is a net bad thing in the first place. It encourages better security and makes companies less likely to store my private information.

thehappypm 5y ago
If the G7 banned crypto trading, even if ransomware hackers wanted to be paid in crypto, companies would be unable to do so without breaking the law, which would be untenable. The bottom would fall out. Yes, people in other countries could do it, but without major economies pumping in value, they're more of a curiosity. Which, maybe would be better.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  You don't need to ban crypto trading for that, you can just criminalize paying ransoms.
emodendroket 5y ago
You don't have to; it's only valuable because you can legally change it for real currency.

Mc_Big_G 5y ago

I'd like to hear how internet advocates address child pornography without deploying a fallacy. The internet makes child pornography possible, without the former, the latter cannot thrive. The defenses I usually hear come in the form of "CD ROMs facilitate bad stuff, too," which is a fact, but doesn't absolve the internet's central role in child porn. As the article states, there is simply no way to attain child porn without the internet. Maybe they could do DVD or CD ROM, but that would be sooooo slow (but not impossible?)

px43 5y ago

Heh, what? Ransomware existed long before cryptocurrencies. Money laundering via ACH, SWIFT, stolen credit cards, gift cards, and all sorts of online payment systems like PayPal are still huge, no cryptocurrencies required. Cryptocurrencies are used today because they're the most efficient way to make online payments, which is a net positive for everyone. It's just as easy to hunt down criminals using cryptocurrencies as it was to hunt online criminals before cryptocurrencies got popular. https://www.knowbe4.com/ransomware https://www.knowbe4.com/ransomware

SavantIdiot 5y ago
This is enlightening. The 1989 ransomware that had a PO Box in Panama is hilarious. Really? Panama? Good point, thanks. However, opaque ledgers may make it difficult to hunt them down (Zcash, monero) in the future.
- px43 5y ago
  Maybe companies will start enabling MFA by then? Kind of frustrating how easy it still is to break into critical infrastructure. I do that sort of thing regularly as my day job. Companies who put a slight effort into security don't get ransomwared. The idea that law enforcement needs full visibility into everyone's financial history, and that's the only way for them to stop crime, is ridiculous.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think it also makes a convincing argument for bringing back on-site backups. If there are weekly/daily backups on local disks (tapes?) that are airgapped after backup, that would save exposing credentials to the cloud storage backups. Tape is dead, long live tape!
thehappypm 5y ago
I deeply disagree that crypto is the easiest way to make online payments. Have you ever used Venmo? Or even Facebook pay? Or Zelle? Sure, it might be the easiest way to send money cross-border, but that's an edge case, the vast, vast majority of transactions are same-country.

quanticle 5y ago

The problem isn't that Bitcoin enables hacking. The problem is, pardon my language, that our cybersecurity is absolute, utter unremediated shit. Every time a corporate PR press release uses the word "sophisticated" to refer to hackers, I roll my eyes. These hackers aren't using processor-level side channel attacks to read secrets out of memory. They're not using Rowhammer to alter encryption keys. They're doing basic things like, exploiting SQL injection. They're getting people with phishing. They're taking advantage of the fact that these giant corporations have willfully ignored every cybersecurity best practice for the past twenty years because it might cost them a few days worth of revenue to implement things like least-privilege access and two-factor authentication. Imagine a world where banks and businesses just kept their cash out on the counter, in unlocked boxes. One day, a bunch of "sophisticated" thieves come in and start grabbing the boxes and driving off. What is the logical response? 1. Ban cars 2. Ask banks and businesses to please use lockboxes and safes Both are solutions to the problem of thieves jumping in and grabbing cash. But I would submit that option 2 makes far more sense that option 1.

quanticle 5y ago
Just to follow up on the point, here's a Bloomberg piece that states that Colonial Pipeline was because they didn't use 2FA to secure their VPN, which allowed the hackers to compromise their network with a single cracked or sprayed password: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/hackers-breached-colonial-pipeline-using-compromised-password https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-04/hackers-b... In terms of security best practices, this ranks right up there with not leaving your keys in the ignition while you go shopping. This is the world in which we live: multimillion dollar corporations being either too cheap, incompetent, or lazy to issue RSA tokens, Yubikeys or phone-based TOTP for their VPNs. And somehow this is the fault of Bitcoin?

matthewmarkus 5y ago

The "problem" here is that a market for infrastructure bugs now exists. The birth of a market isn't a bad thing, though. Furthermore, the market hasn't created the bugs, but exposed them! This exposure is a net benefit to society because the bugs have value that predates the advent of cryptocurrencies. It's just that before cryptocurrencies the value was hidden and only unlockable by nation states in times of war. Far better for infrastructure to be continuously under attack and strengthened via ransomware than to completely collapse in battle.

onetimeusename 5y ago

I think creating a currency outside the reaches of politicians is the point, come what may. That isn't to say ransomware isn't bad, there are other obvious ways of stopping ransomware. The bigger point is that a financial system should not have a central authority who can limit access to it. Some cryptocurrencies have gone further and built privacy into the transactions also.

Black101 5y ago

You are another one of those that want no privacy for anyone...

mam3 5y ago

Independently of how you or I feel about it, crypro enables anonymous payment. This is a feature of anonymous payment not a bug.

Dove 5y ago

Meaningful freedoms always include the possibility of abusing those freedoms. People will use the free exchange of ideas to advocate for falsehoods, start cults, and create political movements with terrible consequences. But they also use it to make the world a better place. New ideas that have advanced us as a civilization have generally started out as subversive and the freedom that allows them to grow to widespread acceptance is important. While the abuses are awful, and we can try to make the specifically abusive aspects illegal, it's hard to fully separate the good from the evil. In the end, the freedom to change to world for good always entails the freedom to change it for evil, too. But at least in this area, historically, the big wins wipe out the big losses -- and even if they didn't, I still want the wins. This principle is true in almost every area of life. Strong encryption, for example, does help terrorists and cybercriminals, but it also helps revolutionaries and businessmen and ordinary citizens. I don't want to give too many examples because these things tend to be politically hot topics, and I don't want to distract from the central principle: meaningful freedoms can be abused, but are worth it because they also change the world. I would say this is the case with cryptocurrencies as well. It is true that they enable certain criminal economies. Perhaps some of those economies would still function without cryptocurrencies, and perhaps some -- as the article suggests -- would no longer be viable. But cryptocurriencies enable people to build any economy they like without the approval or supervision of a state. There are places where the government does sort of a terrible job managing its money, where this is a major benefit to people. There are people doing things unpopular with some company or some government, who can still do them practically because of the economies enabled by cryptocurrencies. These people are by nature pretty subversive, and a lot of them are doing things I do not like -- but some are doing things I am very glad they are still able to do. Freedom's like that. Some people use it for evil. Some people use it for good. And the difficulties we have in all agreeing on what's good and evil (and the particular difficulties big governments and corporations have in getting the answer to that question right!) are why I'll almost always side broadly with freedom. When people use bitcoin to do criminal things, I'm all for prosecuting them for the crimes -- but leave bitcoin alone. The ability of people to run an economy without the government's permission is something I really like them to have.

jude- 5y ago

This is an exchange and banking problem. Someone somewhere is allowing these terrorists to cash out. Find the bank (or country hosting it), cut them off from SWIFT, and apply sanctions until they stop funding terrorism. Cryptocurrency, like the Internet, is merely the medium.