A cryptocurrency is a decentralised payment system, which basically lets people send currency to each other over the web without the need for a trusted third party such as a bank or financial institution. The transactions are cheap, and in many cases, they are free. And also, the payments are pseudo anonymous as well. The implications of this is done by everyone having a full copy of all the transactions that have ever happened with Bitcoin. This creates an incredibly resilient network, which means that no one can change or reverse or police any of the transactions. The high level of anonymity in there means that it is very hard to trace transactions. it is not totally impossible, but it is impractical in most cases. So crime with cryptocurrency– because you have got fast, borderless transactions, and you have got a high level of anonymity, it in theory creates a system that is ripe for exploitation.
So in most cases when it is a crime online with online payment systems, then they tend to go to the authorities and, say, we can hand over this payment information or we can stop these transactions and reverse crypto news. And none of that can happen with Bitcoin, so it makes it ripe for criminals, in theory. In light of this, a lot of different agencies are researching into Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and trying to understand how it works and what they can do to police it. it is also been in the media quite a few times, and the media, being the media, like focus on the bad side of it. So they focus very heavily on the crime with it. So if there’s a theft or a scam or something like that, then they tend to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.
But there’s actually very little evidence of the scale of the problem of crime with Cryptocurrencies. We do not know if there’s a lot or we do not know if there’s a little. But despite this, people are very quick to brand it as a criminal thing, and they forget the legitimate uses, such as the fast and quick payment. So the next question that I’d like to research as well is looking at the scale of the problem of crime with cryptocurrency. So by generating a log of known scams and thefts and things like that, we can then cross reference that with the public transaction log of all transactions and see how much of the transactions actually illegal and criminal are. So my final question would be to what extent does the technology itself actually facilitate crime? By looking back at the crime logs, we can see which particular sorts of crime happen, and if it is actually the technology’s fault, or is this just the same old crimes that we have been looking at before. And once we have considered these things, we can start to think about possible solutions to the issue of crime with Bitcoin.