The Web is part of society and is shaped by society. And as long as society is not a crime -free place, the Web cannot be a crime -free place.
What is a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a decentralized payment system, which in turn allows people to send money to each other over the web without the need for a reliable third party such as a bank or financial institution. Transactions are cheap, and in many cases, they are free. And again, pseudo -anonymous payments as well.
Likewise, the main feature is that it is completely decentralized, which means that there is not even a single central point of authority or anything like that. The implications of this are that everyone has a full copy of all transactions that take place in Bitcoin. This makes for an incredibly innovative network, which means no one can change or go back or police any transactions.
The high level of familiarity there means it is very difficult to track transactions. This is not entirely impossible, but impractical in most cases. Such is the crime of cryptocurrency– because you have quick, unlimited transactions, and have a high level of anonymity, it in theory creates a system that is ripe for exploitation. So in most cases if it is an online violation with online payment systems, then they intend to go to the authorities and, thus, we can provide this payment information or we can stop these transactions. and reverse it. And none of that can happen with Bitcoin, so it’s ripe for criminals, in theory.
As a result, many different agencies are examining Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and trying to understand how it works and what they can do to police it. A few times it also goes to the media, and the media, as media, like to focus on the bad side of it. That’s why they focus so much on crime. So if there is a theft or scam or something like that, then they tend to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.
So the most famous is probably the Silk Road, which was taken over recently, and with their $ 1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went on to pay for anything from drugs to guns to hit the men of sorts of things. And the media, too, is too quick to blame it on Bitcoins and say it’s the fault of the Bitcoin user.
But there is really little evidence on the scale of the crime problem in cryptocurrencies. We don’t know if there is much or we don’t know if there is little. But despite this, people are very quick to mark it as a criminal matter, and they forget the legitimate uses, such as quick and easy payments.
So some of the research questions I’ve looked at in this area are what does Bitcoin crime look like? That’s why a lot of people would say that scams and thefts have happened over the years. But the ways in which this happens are changing with technology. That’s why a street scammer in Victoria is practically doing something very different to a 419 male scammer in Nigeria.
So the next question I want to research as well is to look at the extent of the cryptocurrency crime problem. So by creating a log of known scams and thefts and things like that, we can cross reference that to the public transaction record of all transactions and see exactly how many. transactions are actually illegal and criminal. So my final question, to what extent does technology itself accelerate crime? By looking at the crime records, we can see what specific types of crime have occurred, and whether they are actually technological faults, or are they the same old crimes that we have previously looked at . And once we consider these things, we can start thinking about possible solutions to the Bitcoin crime issue.
And we can consider that the only appropriate solution would be one that would preserve the underlying costs of the technology itself, which could be privacy and decentralization. A lot of focus from the media is looking at the criminal aspects of it. And they don’t offer enough value to legitimate uses, because Bitcoin is a technology that can make quick, easy payments, which is useful to anyone who pays for anything on the web.