he Web is portion of society and is shaped by society. And until society is a crime-free zone, the Net will not be a crime-free zone.

So what is a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency can be a decentralised payment program, which generally lets folks send currency to one another more than the internet with out the require for any trusted third party which include a bank or financial institution. The transactions are low-cost, and in several instances, they're absolutely free. And also, the payments are pseudo anonymous as well.

As well as that, the primary feature is that it is totally decentralised, which means that there's no single central point of authority or something like that. The implications of this can be performed by absolutely everyone possessing a complete copy of all the transactions that have ever occurred with Bitcoin. This creates an incredibly resilient network, which implies that no one can alter or reverse or police any on the transactions.

The high degree of anonymity in there implies that it's quite difficult to trace transactions. It's not entirely impossible, but it's impractical in most circumstances. So crime with cryptocurrency-- due to the fact you've got quick, borderless transactions, and you have got a higher degree of anonymity, it in theory creates a program which is ripe for exploitation. So in most cases when it's a crime on-line with online payment systems, then they tend to visit the authorities and, say, we are able to hand more than this payment details or we can cease these transactions and reverse them. And none of that will happen with Bitcoin, so it makes it ripe for criminals, in theory.

In light of this, plenty of distinctive agencies are researching into Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and attempting to have an understanding of how it performs and what they can do to police it. It's also been in the media quite a handful of instances, and the media, becoming the media, like focus on the bad side of it. So they concentrate pretty heavily on the crime with it. So if there is a theft or a scam or some thing like that, then they tend to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin customers.

So probably the most notable is in all probability Silk Road, which got taken down not too long ago, and by way of their $1.2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went to pay for anything from drugs to guns to hit males to those sorts of items. As well as the media, again, pretty swiftly to blame this on Bitcoins and say that it was the Bitcoin user's fault.

But there's essentially extremely small proof of your scale of the problem of crime with cryptocurrencies. We don't know if there's a good deal or we never know if there's a little bit. But regardless of this, individuals are quite fast to brand it as a criminal issue, and they overlook the legitimate uses, such as the rapidly and speedy payment.

So a few analysis questions I'm seeking at in this location is what does crime with Bitcoin look like? So loads of people today will say that scams and thefts have been going on for ages. But the indicates by means of which they take place alterations with all the technology. So a Victorian street swindler would practically be doing something very unique to a 419 Nigerian prince scammer.

So the next question that I'd prefer to analysis also is hunting at the scale from the challenge of crime with cryptocurrency. So by creating a log of identified scams and thefts and things like that, we are able to then cross reference that with all the public transaction log of all transactions and see just how much on the transactions are essentially illegal and criminal. So my final query will be, to what extent does the technologies itself actually facilitate crime? By searching back in the crime logs, we can see which unique sorts of crime occur, and if it is actually basically the technology's fault, or is this just the exact same old crimes that we've been seeking at before. And once we've think about these things, we are able to start off to think about probable solutions towards the issue of crime with Bitcoin.

And we can take into account that the only suitable remedy would be one that preserves the underlying values of your technologies itself, which would be privacy and decentralisation. Many concentrate from the media would be to look at the criminal elements of it. And they do not give enough value to the reputable uses, since Bitcoin is actually a technology that enables rapid, quick payments, which can be helpful to anyone that's ever paid for anything on the net.