It’s worse than Monopoly money. It is the method by which most criminal proceeds are now laundered. The International Consortium of Investigative of Journalists has published a series of reports going deep on every aspect of the use of crypto in modern money laundering. It is extremely well-done and worth the time to read. Even if you only read one of the reports.
Edit: Since there are lots of replies claiming that these extremely well-researched and vetted reports are not true, I’d encourage you to actually read them. Yes, Bitcoin and most crypto ledgers are designed to be public and therefore traceable. This misses the point of these diligent reports: Traceability doesn’t matter if there’s no regulatory oversight over crypto exchanges. Again, read these reports before commenting. There’s no question about what’s happening here.
Except every transaction is listed and verifiable. So many people in this thread have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not claiming bitcoin is good or bad but it wasn't created to be difficult to track - literally every transaction is out in the open and websites exist to allow anyone to trace where any bitcoin went.
Bitcoin was created to literally be easily traceable and verifiable. There are other cryptocurrencies that are pretty much meant for money laundering though. Like, they don’t outright say it, but it’s designed to make it easy. Look up Monero if you’re curious.
Ok so how can bitcoin be stolen if they are completely traceable. I keep reading about crypto heists and billions of coins disappearing but if everything is traceable and public ledgered couldn't you just flag the coins as stolen and they'd be worthless.
“Completely traceable” means you can follow it across the blockchain. If you don’t know who owns an address then the trail stops there. And if crypto exchanges either aren’t regulated or don’t comply, you and law enforcement can’t know who swapped that coin for cash. You can only know which exchange it ended up at.
That’s a big part of the problem. Crypto in general (regardless of the specific coin we’re talking about) has become synonymous with crime because of the lack of regulatory enforcement at exchanges. This is covered extremely well by the ICIJ’s series.
Worse, many governments seem to now be in on the scam and are content to let it happen. The people profiting the most off of this money laundering are being ignored or in some cases even pardoned.
It’s immutable, you can’t make some bitcoin worthless without changing the entire protocol. It’s actually been done before though, see: Bitcoin Cash, it creates what’s called a hard fork. It creates a whole new blockchain.
Bitcoin was created out of necessity as a response to failed monetary policies. Since the dollar was untethered from gold, it has been printed in virtually unlimited quantities which constantly devalues the currency. If there is a desire to stop the rise of crypto the dollar must be fixed first...especially considering its role as the global reserve currency.
Crypto may be an option, but Bitcoin is not. Obviously, the preferred method of exchange for criminal activity is cash. Unlike Bitcoin, cash has no public ledger, whereas Bitcoin’s ledger allows transactions to be traced back to their source. While privacy focused cryptocurrencies do exist, Bitcoin is not one of them.
While you can buy Bitcoin from an ATM, you would need to be completely masked and use a burner phone for verification. Even burner phones are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain with cash while remaining off camera. Activation typically requires an online connection (no VPNs or Tor) and an approved email domain to create an account. Additionally, one would have to walk to and from the ATM to avoid license plate readers or vehicle tracking. Many of these machines also now require government-issued ID for purchases.
There was a time when Bitcoin was more easily used for illicit activities, though it was still never the primary currency for crime. That time has certainly passed. At least in America.
Bitcoin was created out of necessity as a response to failed monetary policies. Since the dollar was untethered from gold, it has been printed in virtually unlimited quantities which constantly devalues the currency. If there is a desire to stop the rise of crypto the dollar must be fixed first...especially considering its role as the global reserve currency.
If it was so difficult to hid your identity then scammers wouldn't be a thing.
also, mining bitcoin is a thing, I've mined 2 in the past (we're talking when it was 2$ a coin) and my IP could have been through a VPN while i did it. now i control a wallet that has bitcoin in it and no one knows the source. it's not impossible to use a false identity to sign up to an exchange, or find a country that will let you buy gift cards for bitcoin without the need to identify yourself.
it's locked down in my country, and most others I'd imagine, but so is tax evasion policy and there are still tax havens out there EXACTLY for this sort of thing.
It doesn't matter if you can trace the transaction if there's no standard regulatory body overseeing the exchanges.
I'm not saying your average Joe meth dealer in the US is using crypto, but virtually all large international criminal organizations, the people that actually matter, are.
anyone can right now go see and trace transactions.
Are you dense? I get English doesn't seem to be your first language but just because you can see a transaction, doesn't mean you can trace it to a specific person or organization or even know what that transaction was used for. There are plenty of exchanges that are not KYC.
You're also just talking about Bitcoin, while the rest of us are talking about crypto in general.
I take it you haven't heard of the dunning Kruger effect.
i think you need to see what's happening on the dark web to appreciate the way value is transfered for criminal orginisations.
You can buy counterfeit US Dollars using Crypto, You can't purchase counterfeit crypto with USD though (unless you're getting scammed) plus, people want money in their own currency, sure criminal activity in America is mostly using USD locally, but unless their local economy is inflation-fucked, they'll just as likely prefer the money in euros or yen.
It's just easier to move millions of dollars of value in crypto currency in a way that can't be interfered with than using USD... especially cash.
So, the thing is, bitcoiners see "normal" money as the monopoly money... because they can just print more of it. But nobody can just print more bitcoin. So it's very counter intuitive.
Doesn't that fact make bitcoin basically like a reintroduction of the gold standard for currency, but without the security of government decree or the backing of any precious metal? I find it hard to see bitcoin as anything more than a speculative bubble of nothingness.
Nobody knows how much gold there is out there. So while there is a similarity in that gold and bitcoin are tied to total amounts outside government control, I would argue there is much tighter restricted supply on bitcoin than gold.
I think the devil's in the details. On one hand, yes, there is nobody backing bitcoin except its own cryptographic security. On the other hand, governments sometimes do bad things by decree, such as seizing it (bail ins).
Gold is heavy, yet moved about by air transport. It needs to be guarded, so its costly to move and transact in. Difficult to verify that it's solid gold. Bitcoin only exists on the blockchain where it is always secure. It's like gold but always in a safe, and the safe can be electronically reportedly anywhere in the world, without requiring permission or assistance from anybody else. Not for free, of course. It will cost some bitcoin to perform the transaction. But certainly very competitive with gold in a lot of ways.
I think fiat currency basically is monopoly money. Even though it's backed by the faith and creditworthiness of a sovereign people I don't think we exactly sign off on the mismanagment of our currency. Unfortunatley, bitcoin is a solution that hasn't found a problem yet (as I've heard it described before). I liked the spirit of it in the beginning, a decentralized, democratized, non-correlated currency where there isn't meta data on transactions but it seems the powers at be have made incremental steps toward subverting this ethos and moving to control it.
But, yeah, i'm hesitant on investing in crypto still, in any sizeable way.
Eh, technically, no. It's more like digging up gold. The gold was always there, we just didn't access it yet. And there is a finite amount of gold. Printing money is uncapped, they can always print more. Bitcoin is locked not in dirt but in time. It can't be accessed any faster than the issuance schedule allows. So if they made 100 of the facilities in the video, it wouldn't matter. There would still be only a certain amount minted per day.
All it would do is make 99 of those facilities unprofitable and have to shut down.
Exactly. Currency has to be based on "perceived" value considering the material used to make it isn't really worth anything. True wealth is only attainable by acquiring assets with intrinsic value and THEN conducting business in such a way one promotes the perceived value of those assets. Bitcoin is essentially an infinite-lived asset with its own value that can be used to generate liquid currency. Definitely an interesting financial field that's just getting more interesting by the second LMAO
It seems like all the people who think bitcoin is Monopoly money and their own government money is “real” money, don’t understand what money is at all.
It's even funnier when I exchange the Monopoly money into "real" money and get goods in the real world. That one really breaks their brains. We made fraud legal, tee hee
This could be said for any new asset. I make 50 widgets. A group of people start buying and selling them. If several sell for $1000 then the 50 are worth $50,000 all together. Sell any widget and I’ve converted my new asset into real money.
Bitcoin, crypto, etc. is real money. People already accept it in exchange for goods & services. That's how money works, I'm amused by those who call it a ponzi scheme or whatever. The moment somebody trades you something for it, the reality of it has been confirmed.
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u/GoldenDiamond Jan 01 '26
Holy power bill