Rather than "put up with" this "serious and dangerous" cyber crime, we should celebrate it. The ability to turn vulnerable infrastructure into cash is a godsend

Rather than "put up with" this "serious and dangerous" cyber crime, we should celebrate it. The ability to turn vulnerable infrastructure into cash is a godsend for our infosec and our national security (which are increasingly difficult to distinguish). > the enabler I believe this is the source of our disagreement. The enabler is the vulnerability in the infrastructure and the concentration of risk to make a juicy target. If it were impossible to turn this vulnerability into cash--and I disagree that even an effective ban on Bitcoin would accomplish that--it would still exist. Other actors have non-financial incentives to find and sit on these vulnerabilities. Imagine if the ransomware attacks of the last few months had never happened. Those vulnerabilities would still exist, unknown to the defenders, waiting for discovery by attackers. China might discover them and exploit them all simultaneously with an invasion of Taiwan, for example. That would be worth far more than even a few hundred million dollars, in my estimation. These attacks hurt in the short term, to be sure, but they are very helpful in the medium to long term, because they force us to actually harden our infrastructure.