Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday December 19 2016, @10:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-right-now-it's-virtually-disruptive? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The ora, paper money pegged to the South African rand, is one of hundreds of alternative currencies issued for mainly political reasons, but many of the newer currencies are increasingly virtual—digital representations of money consisting of nothing more than computer code. Most prominent among them: bitcoin, which, like conventional currency, can be traded online, transferred, stored or exchanged for cash. But, unlike conventional currency, it lives primarily on the internet, secured by layers of computer code.

This suits bitcoin users just fine. They want a secure way to exchange money by laptop, mobile phone or email. Yet so do terrorists and criminals, whom the U.S. government worries might develop and deploy their own uncrackable virtual currencies. Newsweek has learned hundreds of experts inside the nation's defense and intelligence agencies, as well as private-sector researchers in finance, technology and various think tanks across the country—some of them under contract with the U.S. government—are now investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system.

"There is a real danger and a challenge here with respect to virtual currencies," says Juan Zarate, a senior adviser at Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies and on the board of advisers for San Francisco's Coinbase, one of the most popular virtual currency exchanges in the world. "And it runs contrary to the very fundamentals of the transparency and accountability that we've tried to build for the last three decades to tackle terrorism, human trafficking, money-laundering and many other types of criminal activity."

[...] The biggest concern the U.S. has about virtual currencies, Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they'll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America's defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by butthurt on Monday December 19 2016, @10:18PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Monday December 19 2016, @10:18PM (#443395) Journal

    In Venezuela and India, cash is only for criminals.

    /article.pl?sid=16/12/13/0943223 [soylentnews.org]
    /article.pl?sid=16/11/09/0433215 [soylentnews.org]

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 19 2016, @10:55PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday December 19 2016, @10:55PM (#443414) Journal

    Same reason the USA got rid of bills above $100.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:11PM (#443425)

      That sort of mentality is toxic to the freedoms and convenience of ordinary citizens. We shouldn't be sacrificing freedoms and inconveniencing people just because bad guys like to use bills above $100.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:25PM (#443432)

        Ordinary Americans are too poor to have the luxury of carrying a $100 bill. But please continue championing the right of billionaires to carry as much petty cash in $100 bills as they want.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:38AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:38AM (#443456)

          Ordinary Americans are too poor to have the luxury of carrying a $100 bill.

          You're full of shit. Even a poor person can carry around $100 bills, and I and many others I know have done so numerous times.

          And regardless of how many people do it, it's important to respect people's freedoms and stop focusing on stopping Bad Guys at all costs. Enough of that toxic Tough On Crime bullshit.

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:20AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @11:20AM (#443687)

          Just for your information: The word "bill" is not related to "billion". A $100 bill is just an official piece of paper (or whatever material those bills are made of) worth $100 by law. You don't have to own billions of dollars to be able to carry a $100 bill. Rather, the minimum amount you have to own in order to be able to carry a $100 bill that you own is, well, one hundred dollars. At minimum wage, and an assumed work day of 8 hours (most poor people work more, BTW), that's less than what you earn in two days. So you'd have ample opportunity to carry a $100 bill around even if you are poor.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:40AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:40AM (#443626) Journal

      I haven't heard that reason given. This is the explanation I've heard:

      On July 14, 1969, David M. Kennedy, the 60th Secretary of the Treasury, and officials at the Federal Reserve Board announced that they would immediately stop distributing currency in denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000. Production of these denominations stopped during World War II. Their main purpose was for bank transfer payments. With the arrival of more secure transfer technologies, however, they were no longer needed for that purpose.

      -- https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx [treasury.gov]

      There are proposals to eliminate the U.S. $100, $50 and $20 bills that do give an anti-crime rationale (discussed in the topic about Venezuela).