Watch: Bitcoin NOT Ideal for Cyber Crime - Marta Belcher, Filecoin Foundation Chair | Forkast.News
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Back in early May, a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline forced the company to pay the hackers US$5 million in cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the FBI had successfully recovered US$2.3 million of the ransom in Bitcoin.
Those who really understood Bitcoin — and blockchain technology’s digital trail of crumbs that led to the crypto’s recovery — were gobsmacked. What could those cybercriminals possibly have been thinking?
Pioneering blockchain lawyer Marta Belcher — general counsel at Protocol Labs and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group — , says many people still do not realize that Bitcoin is not anonymous — it is pseudonymous.
“You're having a public key recorded permanently on a ledger forever. And anyone can see that,” Belcher explained, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “The authorities can see that. In some ways, it's a shortcut for law enforcement.”
Instead of something very traceable by the government, Belcher says having a truly decentralized device for finance is essential to privacy and civil liberties.
“I like to think about this photo that I saw from the Hong Kong protests. There are these photos where there are these long lines at the subway stations because the protesters wanted to buy their train tickets using cash because they didn't want their electronic purchases to place them at the scene of the protest,” Belcher said. “That really underscores that a cashless society is a surveillance society and the importance of certain technologies that can enable anonymous transactions.”
Belcher told Forkast.News that this is how anonymity can enhance civil liberties, and also why privacy coins — fully private and anonymous — matter.
Those who really understood Bitcoin — and blockchain technology’s digital trail of crumbs that led to the crypto’s recovery — were gobsmacked. What could those cybercriminals possibly have been thinking?
Pioneering blockchain lawyer Marta Belcher — general counsel at Protocol Labs and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group — , says many people still do not realize that Bitcoin is not anonymous — it is pseudonymous.
“You're having a public key recorded permanently on a ledger forever. And anyone can see that,” Belcher explained, in a video interview with Forkast.News. “The authorities can see that. In some ways, it's a shortcut for law enforcement.”
Instead of something very traceable by the government, Belcher says having a truly decentralized device for finance is essential to privacy and civil liberties.
“I like to think about this photo that I saw from the Hong Kong protests. There are these photos where there are these long lines at the subway stations because the protesters wanted to buy their train tickets using cash because they didn't want their electronic purchases to place them at the scene of the protest,” Belcher said. “That really underscores that a cashless society is a surveillance society and the importance of certain technologies that can enable anonymous transactions.”
Belcher told Forkast.News that this is how anonymity can enhance civil liberties, and also why privacy coins — fully private and anonymous — matter.