The Web is part of society and is shaped by society. And until society is a crime-free zone, the Web will not be a crime-free zone.

So what is a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a decentralized payment system, which basically allows people to send money to each other over the web without the need for a trusted third party, such as a bank or financial institution. Transactions are cheap and, in many cases, free. And also, the payments are also pseudo anonymous.

Besides that, the main feature is that it is totally decentralized, which means there is no single central point of authority or anything like that. The implications of this are achieved when everyone has a complete copy of all the transactions that have occurred with Bitcoin. This creates an incredibly resilient network, which means that no one can change, reverse, or monitor any of the transactions.

The high level of anonymity means that it is very difficult to trace transactions. It’s not totally impossible, but it’s impractical in most cases. So committing crimes with cryptocurrency: Because it has fast, borderless transactions, and has a high level of anonymity, it theoretically creates a system that is ripe for exploitation. So in most cases, when it comes to online crime with online payment systems, they tend to go to the authorities and, let’s say, we can turn over this payment information or we can stop these transactions and reverse them. And none of that can happen with Bitcoin, so in theory it makes it ripe for criminals.

In light of this, many different agencies are investigating Bitcoin and analyzing Bitcoin and trying to understand how it works and what they can do to control it. He’s also been in the media quite a few times, and the media, being the media, likes to focus on the bad side. So they focus a lot on the crime with that. So if there is a theft or a scam or something like that, they tend to blame Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.

So the most notable is probably Silk Road, which was recently torn down, and through its $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, was used to pay for anything from drugs to guns to hitmen and that sort of thing. And the media, again, very quickly blames Bitcoins and says it was the fault of the Bitcoin user.

But there is actually very little evidence of the scale of the crime problem with cryptocurrencies. We do not know if there is a lot or we do not know if there is little. But despite this, people are very quick to brand it as criminal, and they forget about the legitimate uses, such as quick and fast payment.

So some research questions I’m looking at in this area are: what does crime look like with Bitcoin? So many people will say that scams and thefts have been going on for years. But the means through which they happen change with technology. So a Victorian street hustler would pretty much be doing something very different than a Nigerian prince 419 hustler.

So the next question that I would also like to investigate is to look at the scale of the crime problem with cryptocurrencies. So by generating a log of known scams and thefts and things like that, we can cross-reference it with the public transaction log of all transactions and see how many of the transactions are actually illegal and criminal. So my final question would be, to what extent does technology itself actually facilitate crime? By looking back at crime records, we can see what particular types of crime occur, and whether it is actually the fault of the technology, or if it is simply the same crimes we have been looking at before. And once we’ve considered these things, we can start thinking about possible solutions to the Bitcoin crime problem.

And we can consider that the only adequate solution would be one that preserves the underlying values ​​of the technology itself, which would be privacy and decentralization. Much of the media focus is on looking at the criminal aspects of this. And they don’t place enough value on legitimate uses, because Bitcoin is a technology that enables fast payments, which is useful for anyone who has paid for something on the web.