Crypto crimes and the risk of anonymity
I have written before that governments will never allow anonymous digital currencies and my comments attracted a certain amount of controversy. And I understand why. But to those who say that uncensorable, untraceable digital cash would be a shield against dictators, a force for the oppressed and a boon to free man everywhere… I say be careful what you wish for. The issue of anonymity in payments is complex and crucial and it deserves informed calm strategic thinking because digital currency touches on so many aspects of society.
One obvious and important aspect is crime. Would digital currency change crime? If I hire thugs to lure a cryptobaron to a hotel room and then beat him up to get $1m in bitcoins from him (as actually happened in Japan), is that a crypto-crime or just boring old extortion? If I use Craigslist to lure a HODLer to a street corner and then pull a gun on him and force him to transfer his bitcoins to me (as actually happened in New York), is that a crypto-crime or just boring old mugging? If I get hold of someone's login details and transfer their cryptocurrency to myself (as has just happened in Springfield), is that a crypto-crime or just boring old fraud? If I kidnap the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange and then release him after the payment of a $1 million bitcoin ransom is that, as the Ukrainian interior minister said at the time "bitcoin kidnapping" or just boring old extortion?
Cash or charge? (CC-BY-ND 4.0)
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 These are just crimes, surely? And not very good ones at that, because they are recorded in perpetuity on an immutable public ledger. Personally, if I were to kidnap a cryptocurrency exchange CEO I would ask for the ransom to be paid in some more privacy-protecting cryptocurrency, because as I explained in the FT some years ago, Bitcoin is not a very good choice for this sort of cyber-criminality. It's just not anonymous enough for really decent crimes or the darkest darknets. Hence my scepticism about claims that Bitcoin's long term value will be determined by it's use for crime.
Untraceable
But what if there were an actually untraceable cryptocurrency out there and it wasn't up to governments to allow it or not? Would an aspiring cryptocriminal mastermind be able to use it for something more innovative than the physically-demanding felony of kidnapping? I'm sure the Mafia would be delighted to have anonymous digital cash to zip around the world, but what would they use it for? Might they come up with some dastardly enterprise that is not a virtual shadow of a crime that has been around since year zero, but a wholly new crime for the virtual world? What if they could find one with the potential to take over from drug dealing (currently approximately 40% of organised crime revenues) as the best option for the criminal entrepreneur?
Ransomware is one interesting candidate. It is certainly a major problem. Criminals seize control of organisations' computer networks, encrypting their data and demanding payment to deliver the decryption keys. Companies paralyzed by the attacks paid hackers an average of more than $300K in 2020 (triple the average of the year before). A cyber security survey last year revealed that more than two-thirds of organisations in the United States had experienced a ransomware attack and had paid a ransom as a result! That’s a pretty decent business for criminals and it certainly was a driver for Bitcoin, although ransomware operators have been moving away from it for some time.
(Once again demonstrating the impending explicit pricing of privacy, the Sodinokibi payment website last year began charging 10% more for Bitcoin ransoms compared to the more private Monero cryptocurrency.)
On the whole, given the basic nature of most organisation’s cyber-defences (more than half of all ransomware attacks stem from spam e-mails), one might expect the ransomware rewards to continue to grow. Apart from anything else, the ransomware raiders are reinvesting their profits in increasingly efficient operations, making for even bigger and bolder attacks.
Assasinate and Win
So, ransomware. But what about a more sinister candidate for large-scale criminality though? Is it time for the "assassination market"? It's not a new idea. A few years ago, Andy Greenberg wrote a great piece about this here on Forbes. He was exploring the specific case of "Kuwabatake Sanjuro" who had set up a Bitcoin-powered market for political assassinations, but in general an assassination market is a form prediction market where any party can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they "guess" the date accurately. This would incentivise the assassination of individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action would take place, could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject's death.
This idea originated, to the best of my knowledge, with Jim Bell. Way back in 1995 he set it out in an essay on "assassination politics". I suppose it was inevitable that advent of digital cash would stimulate thought experiments in this area and it was interesting to me then (and now) because it showed the potential for innovation around digital money even in the field of criminality.
Here's how the market works and why the incentive works, as I explained in my book "Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin". Someone runs a public book on the anticipated death dates of public figures. If I hate some tech CEO (for example), I place a bet on when they will die. When the CEO dies, whoever had the closest guess to their date and time of death wins all of the money staked, less a cut for the house. Let's say I bet $5 (using anonymous digital cash through the TOR network) that a specific tech CEO is going to die at 9am on April Fool's Day 2022. Other people hate this person too and they put down bets as well. The more hated the person is, the more bets there will be.
April Fool’s Day 2020 comes around. There’s now ten million dollars staked on this particularly CEO dying at 9am. I pay a hit man five million dollars to murder the CEO. Hurrah! I’ve won the bet, so I get the ten million dollars sent to me in anonymous digital cash and give half to the hit man. No-one can pin the crime on me because I paid the hitman in untraceable anonymous digital cash as well.
I’m just the lucky winner of the lottery.
But better than that is that if I can get enough bets put on someone, then I don’t even have to take the risk of hiring the hitman. If I use some anonymous bots or friendly tolls to coordinate a social media campaign to get a million people to put a $5 bet on the date of the tech CEOs death, then some enterprising hit man will make their own bet and kill them. If the general public had bet five million bucks on 31st March and some enterprising cryptopsycho had murdered the CEO themselves the day before, then it would only have cost me a $5, and I would have regarded that as $5 well spent, as would (presumably) everyone else who bet $5!
(This is an edited version of an article first published on Forbes, 14th April 2021.)