What exactly is a Cryptocurrency And even Bitcoin?
The Web is part of society and is shaped by society. And until society is just a crime-free zone, the Web won’t be described as a crime-free zone.
So what’s a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is just a decentralised payment system, which basically lets people send currency to each other over the net without the need for a reliable 3rd party like a bank or financial institution. The transactions are cheap, and in many cases, they’re free. And also, the payments are pseudo anonymous as well.
As well as that, the key feature is that it’s totally decentralised, which means that there’s no single central point of authority or anything like that. The implications of the is performed by everyone having a complete copy of all of the transactions that have ever happened with Bitcoin binance airdrops. This creates a remarkably resilient network, which means that no one can change or reverse or police the transactions.
The higher level of anonymity within means that it’s very difficult to trace transactions. It’s not totally impossible, but it’s impractical in most cases. So crime with cryptocurrency– because you’ve got fast, borderless transactions, and you’ve got a higher level of anonymity, it the theory is that creates a method that’s ripe for exploitation. So in most cases when it’s an offense online with online payment systems, they tend to attend the authorities and, say, we could hand over this payment information or we could stop these transactions and reverse them. And none of that will happen with Bitcoin, so it helps it be ripe for criminals, in theory.
In light of the, lots of different agencies are researching into Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and wanting to understand how it works and what they are able to do to police it. It’s also been in the media many times, and the media, being the media, like concentrate on the bad side of it. So they really focus very heavily on the crime with it. So if there’s a theft or a scam or something like this, they have a tendency to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.
So the most notable is probably Silk Road, which got taken down recently, and through their $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went to fund anything from drugs to guns hitting men to those kinds of things. And the media, again, very quickly to blame this on Bitcoins and say that it was the Bitcoin user’s fault.
But there’s actually almost no proof the scale of the issue of crime with cryptocurrencies. We don’t know if there’s a lot or we don’t know if there’s a little. But regardless of this, people are very quick to brand it as a criminal thing, and they forget the legitimate uses, including the fast and quick payment.
So a couple of research questions I’m looking at in this area is what does crime with Bitcoin appear to be? So lots of people will say that scams and thefts have already been going on for ages. But the means through which they happen changes with the technology. So a Victorian street swindler would practically be doing something very dissimilar to a 419 Nigerian prince scammer.
So the following question that I’d like to analyze as well is looking at the scale of the issue of crime with cryptocurrency. So by generating a log of known scams and thefts and things such as that, we may then cross reference that with people transaction log of most transactions and see just how much of the transactions are in fact illegal and criminal. So my final question could be, as to the extent does the technology itself actually facilitate crime? By looking back at the crime logs, we could see which particular kinds of crime happen, and when it is actually the technology’s fault, or is this just the same kind of crimes that we’ve been looking at before. And once we’ve consider these exact things, we could start to consider possible answers to the problem of crime with Bitcoin.
And we could consider that the sole suitable solution could be one that preserves the underlying values of the technology itself, which will be privacy and decentralisation. Plenty of focus from the media would be to consider the criminal facets of it. And they don’t give enough value to the legitimate uses, because Bitcoin is just a technology that allows fast, quick payments, which can be useful to anyone that’s ever taken care of anything on the web.