Article 'It's time to act on crime friendly bitcoin' excerpt: U.S. bitcoin exchanges can be pressured to not enable ransomware payments, and the Treasury Department can exert pressure on foreign bitcoin exchanges to either comply with U.S. money-laundering laws or be cut off from all international bank transactions (not just those transactions which originate in the United States). There is also the possibility for a technical solution: clogging the bitcoin network with spam transactions. Posted in The Cleveland Plain Dealer on 5/17/2017. Author is Nickolas Weaver who is a computer researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkely, California. Article was written for the Washington Post.
True. But it will be more difficult and far more risky for the perpetrators. Just extradite them to the U.S. There is a "nice" prison in Kansas where they can spend their time in solitary confinement for 23.5 hours a day.
So why is it that this Bitcoin is so freaking near mainstream acceptance anyway? Excuse my dumbness but that concept just won't fully click in my brain. In growing up days I can recall when a certain coins were Silver (My Favorite!) and people actually floated those big half dollar coins and even the huge somewhat rare Silver Dollar types popped up here and there. And so the history goes as it was then and here we are now. Paper money society probably led to where things are now and pulling the Gold Standard (i suppose) torpedoed the whole economic order back then and ever since is devolved into the chaos we find today in mass money printing, digital currency etc. So how did this whole concept of Bitcoin wind up with so much traction in the first place that we see? The fact it's untraceable?
WannaCryptor: Are governments and financial regulators to blame? https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/05/18/94049/
I don't like the idea of any government managing to track where each one of us wins and spends his money. We do need an anonymous currency, but as with TOR, this can be used for both freedom movements (which could be prevented from occurring without anonymity) and pedophilia. This is more a human problem than a coin or protocol problem. And another thing, if you create legislation for Bitcoin, there are countless other coins, some even more anonymous, that could be used.
We don't need an anonymous currency. If you (not you specifically, not an accusation) are trying to hide what you are doing, it is probably either immoral or illegal. It is a human problem, but like all other human problems, you cannot resolve it without eliminating humans. I'm sure there are many other currency options, but if nobody recognizes it as currency, it is worthless, so they are only a problem if we recognize them. I fail to see where there is any positive reason why we need to enable criminals. There are hospitals being shut down for the sake of providing people with the ability to have anonymous currency so they can steal it from others.
Realize that it is the anonymous means of communication and economics that allows us to have freedom of expression. If things were monitored, we would have a serious problem. What is good, bad, illegal, and immoral are, to some extent, relative. Until the end of the 19th century, slavery was legalized in Brazil. What would you say if a fascist government took power and things that are illegal today were considered legal, or vice versa? We need to have the means to organize ourselves to escape Big Brother. Do some people use these means of anonymity for bad things? No doubt. Do some journalists use such means to denounce oppressions they could not do if they identified? Undoubtedly, too. 1984 by George Orwell addresses these issues of privacy and government informational control, worth reading.
This thread just blew me back into the past when my gramma would give me Silver Dollars and Half-Dollars. She'd make a big stink about it all like it was a special occasion. And indeed it was.
We cannot have a truly "free" currency. It is a pipe dream that's incompatible with humanity. If you want "anonymity" use cash.
When we were kids it was no joke, after every spring storm indian head pennies and buffalo nickels would find their way up out of the ground where we kids had a great time picking up as many as could be found. In the 1960's silver dimes and quarters were a plenty before they were eventually nerfed into lesser content. Yep those were some popular days. Half Dollars were large to us kids but a rare Silver Dollar was the big talk of the neighborhood when some us managed to get them from change by asking the store clerk if they didn't mind, and back then generosity abounded.
