#3 – The Majority Of People That Use Cryptocurrencies Are Criminals | Most Bitcoin Transactions Illicit

This post is part of a larger series of post titled
The Top 10 Cryptocurrency & Bitcoin Misconceptions | Misunderstandings | Concerns | Perceptions | Criticisms in 2017

These criticisms are not unfounded. Over the past month alone, I submitted a few posts related to cryptocurrency illicit activity:

• Don’t Get Cryptojacked | What is Cryptojacking?

• Privacy Is An Illusion Series #2 | How You Can Be Tracked If You Use Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies

• DHS Says Darknet Criminals Are Switching From Bitcoin [BTC] To Monero [XMR] (and passing on ZCash [ZEC] and DASH)

Even the authors of a recent UBS report hint that cryptocurrency might be the “currency of crime” and the government of Algeria will vote on a bill to criminalize Bitcoin transactions.

However, once you understand the technology, then you will realize that Bitcoin’s protocols don’t make it particularly attractive to criminals. Not unlike the pornography industry’s early adoption on the internet, people wanting to buy or do illicit things were among the first users of Bitcoin, but the currency is ill-suited for activities such as laundering. As the privacy post above illustrates, Bitcoin users are theoretically anonymous, but their identities are discoverable by other means.

The fact that something is useful to organized crime is not really saying much given that everything that is useful to everyone has potential criminal use.

While I’ll concede that there is a certain percentage of illicit behavior in the cryptocurrency market, let’s not forget that corporations are also adopting blockchain to mitigate risks and reduce crime:

• Blockchain potential for helping large groups of unrelated companies jointly keep a secure and reliable record of their transactions is garnering significant investment. IBM is integrating their Watson IoT platform with blockchain to help 400 clients share information among business partners on a “need to know” basis.

• Everledger is using blockchain to track diamonds from discovery to cutting to sale, and plans to use the metadata to reduce both forced labor and insurance fraud.

• Deloitte is using blockchain to track key active ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry, hoping to stem $200 billion in losses resulting from the sale of counterfeit drugs.

I could spend hours/days listing more examples, but hopefully my counterargument is clear: while the cryptocurrency market will never rid itself of bad actors, it has passed the point where the bad actors outnumber the good ones. In other words, blockchain technology is doing way more good than evil.

Traversing the Cryptosphere,
Kryptonaut