I've been reading through the story inside the book "
Tracers in the dark" and found on twitter that the Author was a forbes writer and once published, in 2011, an article about the future of bitcoin at 1$ . He had good views about bitcoin and his statements were right.
Fast forward to 2020, his perspective about bitcoin has changed due to the usage of bitcoin, which people thought was untraceable and how it's now a vehicle to track down illegal business and child trafficking businesses, who use bitcoin to receive payments. In his story, I found some terms,
peel chain which I didn't know, and found out it's a means of laundering cryptocurrency, and how chainanalysis reactor was able to trace people through the blockchain.
Initially before the dark web started utilizing bitcoin for illicit activities Andy Greenberg a wired blog writer, believed in bitcoin and passed down reasonable articles about bitcoin when he was with Forbes, when the use case began to change he didn't hesitate to tell the world the bad aspect of bitcoin and the amount of crimes lords or businesses that adopted bitcoin believing that it's untraceable.
Two sides to every story and my response to his stories In a side he writes to unveil to the world how shallow the anonymity of bitcoin is, and the fact it's a bad actor to the society as people use bitcoin to commit crimes. On a second flip, if these illegal businesses are being tracked down with the help of blockchain network, why the blame on bitcoin? people who read his books may not use bitcoin because its usage, dark side, can scare them away. And as we all know, crime stories go longer ways in sales.
Isn't every money likely to be used by crime lords? he claims that the fiat transaction can easily make things easier for the Government to track down illicit businesses. A lot of things are being used to commit crime including the internet, cars, guns, bitcoin etc. Yet, the case of bitcoin is stressed a lot, is it because it's new or something else is attached to it? In conclusion, Crime is bad and people will always frown at whatever tool that helps or facilitates crime. A lot of people like this writer now think evil of bitcoin especially his readers and they forget easily the good use cases of bitcoin like he said in 2011 post.
Photo from twitter
