Some have labelled bitcoin as a prominent foe and, as in this Wall Street Journal opinion piece, called to ban it.
Disrupting the flow of money to criminal enterprises is a traditional law enforcement technique.
Law enforcement are making small but notable gains, including the FBI’s Colonial Pipeline action and the NetWalker takedown in January, both of which involved cryptocurrency seizures .
Bitcoin is a decentralized system launched in January 2009 by a pseudonymous programmer, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Those transactions and addresses, which are recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain, are processed by computers distributed worldwide, known as “miners,” for a small slice of bitcoin as a reward.
The Ransomware Task Force, a coalition of experts and policy makers who released a comprehensive report in April for tackling ransomware, couldn’t come to consensus on whether payments should be prohibited.
There are opposing views.
Weaver was part of a group of scientists who released research in 2011 showing how the pharmaceutical spam ecosystem could be broken up by focusing on payment processing.
If criminals moved from bitcoin to the traditional financial system, those institutions generally cooperate to stop crime.
On the other side, making bitcoin illegal in one region doesn’t make it go away.
The end of the description, though, felt like a cups and balls trick: the bitcoins magically land at an address for which the FBI controlled the private key.
The FBI purposely masked its tradecraft, but it shows that it and agencies such as the IRS are becoming increasingly nimble in cryptocurrency investigations.
Cryptocurrency tracking and seizures have been made possible with help from private sector firms such Cipher Trace and Chainalysis, which described in detail how it tracked NetWalker actors.
Those actors usually get paid in bitcoin, and those webs of criminality can tracked on the blockchain.
Kennedy says the vast majority of ransomware-related cash outs are occurring on just a few exchanges.
“It would be much worse if were happening with a less transparent form of value transfer,” she says.
Further back, he covered military affairs from Seoul, South Korea, and general assignment news for his hometown paper in Illinois.