I am always against the many hacking and scams happening all around the internet. I have been a victim of phishing lately so I know how it felt to be a part of the victim statistic. There must be a way we can fight scammers and hackers without sacrificing privacy in the process. We should not be using decentralization as an excuse to just let go of these bastards.
This news about ShapeShift extending its hands of cooperation to authorities with the end view of tracing the coins and maybe return the coins to their rightful owners is something worth of praise and commendation.
I do not see how a company could help catch thieves and lawbreakers such as the ransomware developer without keeping logs of all the exchange activity of their customers. I understand the desire for privacy-- I like it as much as the next poster, but there has to be a place to draw the line when it comes to dealing with potentially illegal money, and I think that right now the exchange is a decent place to draw that line. The United States dollar was created by the American government and so they basically own the rules for handling it, forcing exchanges to keep records on their customers. While we may not like this, it is necessary to protect good citizens from the bad ones, but it may also bring other unwanted side effects such as the privacy issue.
Another problem is that once Bitcoin becomes even more popular, the need to exchange bitcoin for a more liquid currency such as the dollar or the euro will decrease substantially, which means the previously drawn line of records at exchanges is going to mean less as people can start living directly off hard-to-trace bitcoin. I can see many official entities not wanting to adopt bitcoin from simply the possibility of holding illicitly obtained funds. There really is no clear cut way to go about both privacy and safety in this case without resorting to an anarchic solution such as an "everyone for themselves" policy.
