A top comment on that article said: It actually made my skin crawl reading about it. Never had that reaction to such a story before. Interesting...
You might think this might have been a speculative work of fiction. It wasn't - this is a story that happened.
As for your run of the mill kidnappings for ransom, blackmail, extortion and other things normal people turn to the FBI with, (that you would too, if you got certain very specific threatening letters for example), I think if you come back after 5 minutes of googling the subject you would not consider the general situation to be speculative. We are talking about sources of blackmail, kidnapping and ransom becoming literally completely untraceable, without even a network effect of where the money is going afterward (what pseudonymous addresses).
As for the infrastructural, nuclear and so forth examples, you will observe that placing or turning moles and spies already occurs historically, which shows that the process is possible. You are talking about lowering the barrier to entry and risk profile.
Literally anyone who is in a position to do something, and understands that they could instantly anonymously receive a the digital equivalent of a briefcase full of cash, without it ever showing up anywhere, without needing to hide it as they spend it (except regarding the effect it would have on their visible lifestyle -- hell, they could anonymously transfer it to some fake lottery that pretends they just won it...nothing would ever connect the two, the lottery could be a complete front and seem 100% legitimate. Or even actually be 99% legitimate, with a single person adding another payout while collecting funds for it from the person being paid and making sure the lotteries ledger's add up... you get the idea.)
It would be a disaster to have absolutely zero leads whatsoever in all such cases. Money has a profound effect on the world and a modicum of possible pseudonymous oversight over its movements is quite a bit more than minimally responsible.
Ask yourself, for hte data ransoming story I linked: would you prefer for the btc address to be totally and completely a black box, or the present state of affairs?
Really, the current implementation is an absolute minimum for 'keeping people honest'. It has a very high level of barrier to de-anonymizing users (as far as I understand it), yet given sufficient resources certain leads can at least be put together.
Data ransom shouldn't ever happen to valuable data. Preventing single points of failure is much more important than chasing around the bad actors that come along and exploit them.
Run of the mill kidnappings are parents violating custody agreements.
Infrastructure needs to be resilient in any case.
I don't mind that bitcoin has a public ledger, but you haven't convinced me it is particularly important.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404362 - "Hackers Steal, Encrypt Health Records and Hold Data for Ransom".
and recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6567735 - "You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins"
A top comment on that article said: It actually made my skin crawl reading about it. Never had that reaction to such a story before. Interesting...
You might think this might have been a speculative work of fiction. It wasn't - this is a story that happened.
As for your run of the mill kidnappings for ransom, blackmail, extortion and other things normal people turn to the FBI with, (that you would too, if you got certain very specific threatening letters for example), I think if you come back after 5 minutes of googling the subject you would not consider the general situation to be speculative. We are talking about sources of blackmail, kidnapping and ransom becoming literally completely untraceable, without even a network effect of where the money is going afterward (what pseudonymous addresses).
As for the infrastructural, nuclear and so forth examples, you will observe that placing or turning moles and spies already occurs historically, which shows that the process is possible. You are talking about lowering the barrier to entry and risk profile.
Literally anyone who is in a position to do something, and understands that they could instantly anonymously receive a the digital equivalent of a briefcase full of cash, without it ever showing up anywhere, without needing to hide it as they spend it (except regarding the effect it would have on their visible lifestyle -- hell, they could anonymously transfer it to some fake lottery that pretends they just won it...nothing would ever connect the two, the lottery could be a complete front and seem 100% legitimate. Or even actually be 99% legitimate, with a single person adding another payout while collecting funds for it from the person being paid and making sure the lotteries ledger's add up... you get the idea.)
It would be a disaster to have absolutely zero leads whatsoever in all such cases. Money has a profound effect on the world and a modicum of possible pseudonymous oversight over its movements is quite a bit more than minimally responsible.
Ask yourself, for hte data ransoming story I linked: would you prefer for the btc address to be totally and completely a black box, or the present state of affairs?
Really, the current implementation is an absolute minimum for 'keeping people honest'. It has a very high level of barrier to de-anonymizing users (as far as I understand it), yet given sufficient resources certain leads can at least be put together.