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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is aggressively used in dark net, drug dealing, zero day exploit selling, and is used by nationstates to hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's and governments.

There was a period when people erroneously thought that bitcoin was anonymous and secure.

If the NSA was not working to track down the premiere currency of the dark web and of the nation state actors they work counterintelligence against, this would be dereliction of their duty.

This is like suggesting the FBI tracks down "USD" users. No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use. Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.

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The authority of an agency to track criminal targets is well established by law and accepted by American citizens. That concept is not the issue.

Using wide scale warrant-less data collection with an unspecified secret sauce, however, is questionable in its legality. Is this what voters intend their government to be able to do?

Any time one agency wields immense undocumented powers of surveillance and another agency has a big question mark on a case, humans will be tempted to go the route of parallel construction. That under-table information sharing, to me, is a debate the American people need to be considering.

We aren’t talking about domestic surveillance here. The supposed privacy tool was foreign-targeted. This is NSA’s legit mission.

Are you really so innocent as to believe that the NSA was _only_ targeting foreign Bitcoin holders, or that they made effort at least to avoid capturing info on Americans?

Perhaps back in 2013 they were not so careful to avoid collection on Americans. But now they certainly are. Nobody wants to go to jail.

Why would they be afraid of going to jail? None of them have gone to jail so far. You only face consequences for reporting misbehavior, not for engaging in it.

That's the law, no reason to think otherwise without evidence. I assume the story would be very different if there was any indication this was used on US citizens.

No. We've been through Prism. We know the NSA is doing this. You are not allowed to be this naive anymore.

Actually no. I read all 300+ documents leaked by Snowden independent of the news coverage in order to determine if the media narrative was true, as that would be absolutely enraging to me and I needed to decide if I would need to be calling and mailing my representatives/senators daily about this.

I was not able to find evidence in the leaks to substantiate any claims of improper use on everyday citizens. I like to operate on facts, so if there was a leaked document I somehow missed, you can provide a link and I would be happy to review it.

I concur. The purpose of Snowden’s leaks was to educate the masses that mass surveillance is a thing, and privacy should be taken seriously. He did not suggest the government was breaking the law, just that the law permitted surveillance on a scale that the average person probably wasn’t aware of.

As a result, we gained things like GDPR, which will revolutionize privacy worldwide because of its extra-jurisdictional effects. And think about how much more SSL is happening now. Http:// is mostly gone. We have letsencrypt. Google is encrypting all traffic between datacenters. Etc...

But no, Snowden did not reveal anything suggesting widespread illegal surveillance of Americans.

> dark net, drug dealing

These are law enforcement things. The NSA should not be deployed against drug dealers.

> zero day exploit selling

This is squarely within the NSA's purview. Also North Korea [1].

More broadly, Bitcoin takes cash-like transactions and posts them in a unified computer-friendly database. Of course it will be mined for insights. Even collating U.S. dollar transactions involves querying multiple financial institutions, each who hold their data in various formats.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/north-kor...

if the government is collecting data that another department can use you bet they are sharing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

>No duh, law enforcement and counterintelligence requires regulation of the financial systems in use

I mostly agree with you, but I find this statement odd. There's obviously some regulation that is helpful to law enforcement and counterintelligence (money laundering regulation comes to mind, which you can't even really get around by using BTC). But crime and intelligence operations have a long history of working around those regulations, and both law enforcements and counterintelligence seem to cope just fine.

bitcoin is a horrible currency to do drug deals, the most infamous dark net site, Silk Road was doing $15 million annually at its peak, compare that to the 400 billion illegal drug industry that is mostly transacted with cash. Currently the primary use for bitcoin is speculation. Nation states will hire and pay with cash without the blockchain trail... There was a period of people speculating on a currency whose money supply is controlled by open source software and maintainers and it is still happening.

Why would you even bother making the comparison between the sum of all black market drug activity on the planet and a single niche website hidden behind tor?

I was trying to explain how small bitcoin is compared to the sum of all black market activity by using an example of one the most profitable bitcoin dark market to date

After learning about the war on drugs being a ploy to build up the gun and law enforcement markets.

I wondered if Bitcoin was created by the us to launder and fund projects while still maintaining control over the majority of it and possibly use to collapse other currencies and governments.

They already print cash so we know the anonymous currency isn't frowned upon and the only banned Venezuela crypto none of the other seeming shady coins.

>>>>hire and pay "plausibly deniable" contractors to attack NGO's

Woah, can you give some sources on Bitcoin being used to pay for attacking NGOs? Do you mean DDoS or do you have specific links on that?

Thank Satoshi we have Monero et al. Although we might run into the same problem as regular drug dealers: only the idiots get caught, i.e only the ones using BTC/non-cryptonote get caught.

“Any unregulated financial system is a hive of villainy and scum as a truism.”

Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto.

Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

Wow, you do realize that fiat is the number 1 one way to fund the drug trade and terrorism right? It certainly isn’t crypto.

Number 1 by volume (duh) or number 1 by percentage of transactions for illegal goods and services?

Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

You hear that atomic energy, antibiotics and computers?

> Not exactly a great way to sum up what will prove to be one of the most important innovations in human history.

Dude, lay off of the Kool-Aid.

You don’t consider sound money to be an important innovation?

It is, but we were talking about blockchain currencies.

You don’t believe blockcbain currencies can be a form of sound money? What do you think can? (Not trying to argue, genuinely curious).

Fiat currencies seem to be doing a decent job of it, and they don't require the terawatts of power a crypto currency would need if it were adopted as a primary currency of a major country.

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