Bitcoins stay dirty, no matter how much you launder them
Some people mine Bitcoin for profits but some some people mine it for politics. The operator of a Bitcoin mining pool (a group of miners who work together to share the profits) quoted in CoinDesk recently says that some are investing not to convert electricity into cash but for other reasons "such as to avoid capital controls or avoid sanctions”. Indeed. And this has some serious implications. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington think tank, summarised the emerging situation rather well in their position paper "Crypto Rogues". They noted that "blockchain technology may be the innovation that enables U.S. adversaries for the first time to operate entire economies outside the U.S.-led financial system". Now, while this may be technically slightly inaccurate (there are ways to create anonymous transactions without a blockchain and, indeed, the Swiss central bank has just published a working paper describing how to do so) it again flags up that the widespread availability of decentralised financial services threatens to bypass the existing infrastructure.
Iran provides an obvious example. They have every incentive to want to try new approaches to skirt the long arm of American law. The country already published a new set of regulations designed to funnel Bitcoin mined by Iranians to the state so that the country can use them to pay for imports. When the Iranian regime, for example, set up a venture to explore Bitcoin payments with a Swedish startup, the Swedish banks refused it a bank account because they themselves did not want to become subject to secondary sanctions. As America's Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said at the time (talking about Iran), "If you want to participate in the dollar system you abide by US sanctions".
On the other side of the world, North Korea has been developing a digital currency of its own. According to Alejandro Cao de Benós, President of the Korean Friendship Association, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea intends to go down the Facebook route by creating an asset-backed digital currency rather than a digital fiat currency and then use some sort of blockchain with "Ethereum-style smart contracts" to do business and avoid sanctions. The regime sees this as a way to enforce deals it makes with foreign counterparties by developing a "token based on something with physical value" (eg, gold) in order to create a stable mechanism for payments in international trade between the regime and "other companies/individuals" (although it will not be available to individuals in the DPRK, who will be stuck with the Korean Won).
Across the Pacific in Venezuela, a country often mentioned by Bitcoin enthusiasts as a living case study of the benefits of decentralised cryptocurrency in the fight against tyranny, we find more mining going on: a video posted on Instagram by the 61st Battalion of the 6th Corps of Engineers of the Venezuelan Army shows military buildings converted into giant cryptocurrency mining centres and a warehouse that appears to be full of specialist Bitcoin mining equipment is labelled the "Center for the Production of Digital Assets".
(I noted with interest that they do not appear to be mining "The Petro", the digital currency of the revolution which according to the Bolivarian Council of Mayors’ recent "National Tax Harmonization Agreement" may soon be required for the payment of taxes.)
What… Whatible?
It seems to me that Bitcoin is a pretty poor choice for sanction-busting shenanigans though. Not only is the record of transactions public, but the Bitcoin value is not fungible. This matters. Remember that 2014 IRS Ruling about Bitcoins being a commodity, so that traders would have to track the buying and selling price of each individual Bitcoin in order to assess their tax liability? No? Here's a reminder : "the real lesson from the IRS Bitcoin ruling is that for a currency-or any payment system-to work, its units must be completely fungible".
Fungible (from the Latin "to enjoy" via Medieval Latin phrases such as “fungi vice”, meaning “to take the place of”) is one of my favourite adjectives. It means that all tokens are the same and can be substituted one for another. You owe me a quarter. It doesn't matter _which_ quarter that you give me. Any will do. Any quarter can substitute for any other quarter because they are all the same. The same is true of the Pounds in my bank account, but it isn't true of bitcoins. They are all different and their history can be tracked through the blockchain which is, as we are often reminded, and immutable public record of all transactions.
The lack of fungibility has major implications for criminals, but also for the rest of us. As my good friend Marc Hochstein observed about this some time ago, blockchain’s openness could turn out to be a bug for law-abiding citizens. In England, the High Court (in the decision of AA v Persons Unknown & Ors, Re Bitcoin [2019]) has already ruled that crypto assets such as bitcoins are a form of property capable of being the subject of injunction. You can see what is going to happen: cryptographic exchanges will be required to identity who owns stolen coins and the owner will then be the subject of legal action to recover them. This owner might be entirely innocent about the origin of the coins and will say that they didn't know that the bitcoins they bought are the proceeds of a ransonware attack and may ask to the keep them. But, J.P. Koning points out, that's not how property law works. Even if you accidentally come into possession of stolen property then a judge can still force you to give it back to the rightful owner.
with kind permission of TheOfficeMuse (CC-BY-ND 4.0)
The UK has been experimenting with the “Unexplained Wealth Order” as a way to combat crime and corruption through the traditional money and finance system, but how would this translate to the world of cryptocurrency? Well, perhaps it doesn’t need to. In the world of Bitcoin, smart criminals may well try to use "mixers" or "tumblrs" that jumble together bitcoins to obfuscate their origin but I don’t think this will help in the long run. Apart from anything else, future consumers might want to know the provenance of their money, an idea explored by the artist Nitipak Samsen a decade ago in the Future of Money Design Awards. Check out the brilliant video he made here.
Have you ever wondered where the money in your pocket had come from? Who was the previous owner? Who was the owner before that? Might it be a famous celebrity?… Smart banknotes work by presenting a readable history of ownership on the note itself, an innovation designed to prevent money laundering.
This might work in some interesting ways. People might pay a premium for coins that have an interesting past! Maybe coins that were used by a celebrity to buy drugs or were used to bribe a politician, coins that belonged to a murderer, that kind of thing, might be worth more than coins that belonged to boring people like me.
Clean Money
In the mundane world of dollar, dollar bills we have the concept of “money laundering” to describe what happens when dirty money is mixed with clean money (surely every one of us has touched banknotes that have been involved in some criminal activity!). But this doesn’t work for bitcoins. The “tainted" money stays tainted. Ross Anderson, Ilia Shumailov and Mansoor Ahmed from the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory wrote a terrific paper on this theme a couple of years ago. In “Making Bitcoin Legal” they pose some interesting questions about what to do with tainted cryptocurrency asking, for example, "If an identified customer says ‘Hi, what will you give me for UTXO x?’ and the exchange replies, ‘Sorry, 22% of that was stolen in a robbery last Tuesday, so we’ll only give you 78%’ does the customer then have to turn over the crime proceeds?”. Their idea of a public “taintchain” is an interesting way forward. This would be a mechanism to make stolen coins visible, in which case they might display a futuristic Gresham’s Law dynamic as good coins drive out bad ones!
Whether by taintchain or some other mechanism, it’s actually pretty each to track dirty bitcoins. You can see where this might lead: if law enforcement agencies go to the biggest miners in the world and tell them that if they continue to confirm easily identifiable mixing transaction outputs, they will be accused of money laundering? This is not difficult to imagine, which suggests to me that Bitcoin's lack of fungibility has far-reaching implications.
These implications have not gone unnoticed in the United States. Two of the largest Bitcoin mining companies there, Marathon Patent Inc. and DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (which together account for about a one-twelfth the power of the Bitcoin networks), recently joined forces to create the Digital Currency Miners of North America (DCMNA). This not-for-profit trade association has come up with pretty interesting idea: their miners will only process transactions that comply with American laws, thus extending the benevolent embrace of the U.S. Government into cryptocurrency. The idea (known as "clean mining") is that instead of selecting transactions on the basis of which ones will bring the biggest fees, they will mine transactions based on the wallets that they come from.
We could well see a strange and interesting twist in the world of cryptocurrency that has no analog in the analogue world of notes and coins: black and white money, or clean and dirty money, or light and dark money (an idea that goes back to the earliest days of cryptocurrency) in which some bitcoins will be worth more than others! Maybe a year or two from now, exchanges will be quoted two BTC-USD pairs: clean BTC at $100,000 and dirty BTC at $75,000. This doesn’t happen for GBP-USD or JPY-GBP, which confirms my feeling that whatever Bitcoin is, it isn’t currency.
[An edited version of this article first appeared on Forbes, 28th February 2021.]