According to this PC Mag article, the Justice Department took down the dark web child porn site Welcome to Video, being run in South Korea. This is obviously good news. However, they “also called out Bitcoin for enabling the child pornography site to thrive”. This seems a bit disingenuous to me. Wouldn’t it be similar to “calling out US cash” for enabling the illegal arms or drug trades to thrive?
The article also explains why they singled out bitcoin(the “currency” was used because it was supposedly harder to trace than cash).
The $100 bill is strongly associated with criminal transactions.
Or the same could be said about the internet. The invention of the internet gave billions of individual people a greatly increased ability to communicate with others next door and around the world, free from overt censorship by government or implicit control by large media corporations. Some people did good things with the opportunities that the internet offered. They founded businesses, created online communities for groups that had previously been marginalized, ran charitable efforts through GoFundMe and the like, organized resistance movements in totalitarian countries, created new forms of art, advanced research through Wikis and other new means of communications, etc… Some people did bad things with the opportunities that the internet offered. They became hackers, distributed child porn, wrote penis enlargement spam and Nigerian Prince email scams, created viruses, etc…
But overall, the good outweighs the bad, and the internet has lead to a massive advance in human freedom and prosperity.
What the internet did for communication, BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies will do for money. They will allow any person to interact with any person, anywhere on earth, while thwarting efforts at centralized control by government and big corporations. (At present, there are certain technological barriers that make it hard to use, so only a small portion of the world uses cryptocurrencies. But I believe that will change, as technology always goes from primitive to good to universal. 25 years ago most of us accessed the internet through dial-up modems and had phones that were attached to the wall by cords.)
Once again, some people will do good things with cryptocurrencies and some will do bad things. But overall, the good will outweigh the bad, and cryptocurrencies will lead to a massive advance in human freedom and prosperity.
You can’t send cash over the internet and conventional digital payments are regulated and difficult to move money through anonymously. Cryptocurrencies don’t have any central point of regulation so there’s nothing governments can do to block illicit transactions from occurring on them.
I have to ask if the OP: Did you read the article you linked to? It provides the answer to the question you asked.
I would hardly say that cryptocurrency is blamed for enabling child pornography. I would call it a fact.
I did, and not really. There are other ways to facilitate anonymous payments. One example is to use prepaid debit cards funded with cash.
So your saying child porn didn’t exist before bitcoin? Come on. It may have made it a little easier to pay for, but child porn websites were around long before crypto.
“Enabling” does not mean “Solely Enabled”.
So we have cash and bitcoin enabling child porn. Oh, and the internet too. And cameras. Let’s see if we can put together the whole list.
I’m sure the FBI has a profile on your typical consumer of child porn…so creepy guys that meet that profile.
Those aren’t anonymous for the person receiving the payment. Crypto-currencies provide significant anonymity to both the seller and purchaser.
You can only use prepaid debit cards to pay at registered merchants, not for person to person transactions for precisely this reason:
Because the Visa/Mastercard payment rails are regulated by the government, they can introduce regulation to make it hard for them to use for criminal purposes. They can’t do the same for crypto.
You’re gong to have to blame the children too, at some point, allowing light to reflect off of them and such.
And light itself, of course.
No. It very much doesn’t. The article actually contradicts the idea of the DOJ in the very next paragraph.
In today’s announcement, federal investigators also called out Bitcoin for enabling the child pornography site to thrive. By using the cryptocurrency, buyers on the site could effectively make anonymous transactions. Over a three-year period, Welcome to Video took in at least 420 bitcoins worth over $370,000 at the time of the transactions.
However, the same Bitcoin transactions also helped investigators identify users on the site. This involved sourcing the Bitcoin payments from Welcome to Video back to the third-party cryptocurrency exchanges, which then revealed information on the account holders.
So, rather than Bitcoin helping them stay anonymous, it actually helped the investigators track them down. They were not, in fact, anonymous.
I also note it specifically uses the term “call out,” which means they are accusing Bitcoin as having done something wrong simply because some people chose to use it to commit a crime. This is very dubious logic, like blaming a car manufacturer for making a fast car because it was used in a getaway.
Fortunately, the bulk of the article does not seem to agree with that assessment. Heck, my initial skim of the article missed the “call out” entirely.
Information and commerce are not the same thing. How is anonymity and freedom from government control a virtue for commerce? Would you buy something from an anonymous internet vendor if there were no recourse when he failed to deliver? Would you trade with or invest in a business located somewhere without a stable government and legal system to enforce contracts and property rights?
This is true. And larger denominations of bills have been removed from circulation to make illicit cash transfers more burdensome. Plus if you make a large deposit of cash to your bank, the bank will file a report that you did so. This doesn’t eliminate the anonymity of using cash, but it limits it, which addresses the implication that the government criticzes bitcoin but does nothing about cash.
It’s a fact of life that many modern technologies make crime somewhat easier: the Internet, encryption, bitcoin, etc. This doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to ban those things, but we also can’t close our eyes and plug our ears and pretend there is no connection whatsoever. It’s part of the cost of having those technologies around that they will be used toward evil ends as well as good ones.
Don’t forget all those enabling parents who keep on having more and more children–they’re the true source and need to be controlled!
Any time you might wonder what it is that the PTB are paranoid about because it gives more freedom to us peasants without a way for them to gank it away from us, look to see what’s being blamed for harming children. That’s a sure sign.
But it might. It raises the burden for advocates to demonstrate that there are significant benefits that outweigh the negatives. Unlike the internet, I don’t think that’s self-evident for Bitcoin.