The network is part of society and is shaped by society. And until society becomes an area free of crime, the Web will not be an area free of crime.
So what is cryptocurrency? Cryptocurrency is a decentralized payment system that basically allows people to send money over the network without the need for a trusted third party, such as a bank or financial institution. Transactions are cheap, and in many cases, free. And the payments are also fake anonymous.
Moreover, the main feature is that it is completely decentralized, which means that there is no single central point of control or such. The consequences of this are done by everyone who has a complete copy of every transaction that has ever taken place with Bitcoin. This creates an incredibly strong network, which means that no one can change or reverse or control a transaction.
The high level of anonymity in it means that it is very difficult to keep track of transactions. It’s not entirely impossible, but in most cases it’s not practical. So crime with cryptocurrency – because you have fast, unlimited transactions and a high level of anonymity, creates a system that is theoretically suitable for exploitation. So in most cases when it is an online crime with online payment systems, then they tend to go to the authorities and, let’s say, we can deliver that payment information or stop and cancel those transactions. And that can’t happen with Bitcoin, so it’s ripe for criminals, in theory.
In this regard, many different agencies are researching Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and trying to understand how it works and what they can do to police it. It’s also been decent in the media, and the media, being the media, is paying attention to the downside. So they are very careful about the crime. So if there is a theft or scam or something similar, then Bitcoin and Bitcoin users are usually blamed.
So the most notable is probably Silk Road, which was recently removed, and with $ 1.2 billion in Bitcoins, it went to pay for drugs and guns, to hit those things to hit men. And the media, once again, very quickly blamed Bitcoins and said it was the Bitcoin user’s fault.
But the truth is that there is very little evidence of the size of the crime problem with cryptocurrency. We don’t know if there is much or we don’t know if there is little. But even so, owning one is still beyond the reach of the average person.
So what are some of the research questions I’m looking at in this area what are the crimes with Bitcoin? So many people will say that scams and robberies are long overdue. But the means by which they change are changing with technology. So a Victorian street scammer would do very differently with a scamming 419 Nigerian prince.
So the next question I would like to investigate is also to look at the size of the problem of cryptocurrency crime. So by creating a record of known frauds and thefts and things like that, we can cross-reference the public record of all transactions and see how many of the transactions are illegal and criminal. So my last question would be, to what extent does technology itself really facilitate crime? Looking back at crime records, we can see what kind of crime is happening, and whether it is really the fault of technology, or whether it is an old crime that we are looking at earlier. And with that in mind, with Bitcoin, we can begin to think about possible solutions to the crime problem.
And we can consider that the only appropriate solution would be to preserve the values that underlie the technology itself, which is privacy and decentralization. A lot of media attention is focused on the criminal aspects of this. And they don’t give enough value to legal use, because Bitcoin is a technology that allows for quick and easy payments, which is useful for anyone who has ever paid online.