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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 20 2019, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the convert-it-to-libra-coin-if-course dept.

The bitcoin scam worked — almost too well. In 2012, back when almost no one had heard of the digital coin, he’d started modestly, asking people he found on the dark web for $200 or $300 worth of bitcoin as a way to test out his investment scheme. He told them he could exploit the then huge price differences between various bitcoin exchanges and promised huge rewards. But once they sent the funds, he vanished into the ether to find his next stooge.

There was a certain genius criminal irony to it: He would hype an untraceable anonymous digital currency, then get paid in it.

[...] But he had a problem. It was getting harder to turn the most overhyped currency since the tulip into actual cash.

[...] All of this means that people like our guy who are very rich on paper (or, more accurately, on the blockchain) must devise highly complex methods to convert their ill-gotten gains, or risk losing quite a bit of value, said Tom Robinson, co-founder of the blockchain analytics company Elliptic. “Funds from illicit activities are just lying dormant, and they are waiting to find effective means of cashing out,” he said.

Yet if we know anything about criminals, it’s that they’re resourceful. As financial institutions and regulators the world over grapple with bitcoin’s adaptation to mainstream use, some of these criminals have devised ingenious hacks for converting their money; still others are turning to alternative coins as they seek greater privacy for their transactions and to stay ahead of the law.


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 20 2019, @04:14PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday August 20 2019, @04:14PM (#882648) Journal

    People buy pieces of paper from financial institutions who perpetrated frauds (libor scandal comes to mind) and nobody bats an eye.
    People buy encrypted tokens from the 'net and everybody loses their mind.

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 20 2019, @04:15PM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday August 20 2019, @04:15PM (#882650) Journal

    wtf am I saying. perpetrated fraud? finance IS fraud, as the same money that you rise with your sweat can be printed 1000x by some guys who respond to no electors.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:00PM (#882700)

      wtf am I saying. perpetrated fraud? finance IS fraud, as the same money that you rise with your sweat can be printed 1000x by some guys who respond to no electors.

      No, it doesn't work like that. If you are bitching about fractional banking system, that has to do with *risk* management, not fraud.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Regulation [wikipedia.org]

      Fractional reserve banking doesn't "multiply" anything. It simply prevents cash from being parked in a bank. Look at the example

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Hypothetical_example_of_a_bank_balance_sheet_and_financial_ratios [wikipedia.org]

      The bank simply needs to maintain certain amount of cash at all times to cover normal operations. Otherwise they borrow and lend money, as required. The problem is when banks start to do bullshit like 15 years ago, but that has nothing to do with fractional reserve banking.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @06:08PM (#882703)

      it's different, imo.

      I see economics/finance as a belief system, and its more like organised religion. It has prophets, rituals, it improves chances of reproduction, has sacred texts, places of worship, taboos and mitzvot? Its followers are known to hold irrational convictions about several things that resist rational analysis, dogmatic things that are STATIC AND CAN NEVER BE CHANGED.

        Like religion, it has it's uses in convincing people to do stuff...