Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined. As many cryptocurrencies crash and the FTX bankruptcy moves into the litigation stage, regulators are likely to scrutinize the cryptocurrency world more than … Read More “Decarbonizing Cryptocurrencies through Taxation” »
Category: bitcoin
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Earlier this month, I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space. Nothing in that letter is out of the ordinary, and is in line with what I wrote about blockchain in 2019. In response, Matthew Green has written—not … Read More “On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain” »
Andy Greenberg wrote a long article — an excerpt from his new book — on how law enforcement de-anonymized bitcoin transactions to take down a global child porn ring. Within a few years of Bitcoin’s arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating … Read More “De-anonymizing Bitcoin” »
The US has returned $154 million in bitcoins stolen by a Sony employee. However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii’s wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI’s bitcoin wallet. … Read More “Stolen Bitcoins Returned” »
Google took steps to shut down the Glupteba botnet, at least for now. (The botnet uses the bitcoin blockchain as a backup command-and-control mechanism, making it hard to get rid of it permanently.) So Google is also suing the botnet’s operators. It’s an interesting strategy. Let’s see if it’s successful. Powered by WPeMatico
The FBI has issued a bulletin describing a bitcoin variant of a wire fraud scam: As the agency describes it, the scammer will contact their victim and somehow convince them that they need to send money, either with promises of love, further riches, or by impersonating an actual institution like a bank or utility company. … Read More “Wire Fraud Scam Upgraded with Bitcoin” »
This isn’t the first time I’ve received an e-mail like this: Hey! I’ve done my research and looked at a lot of facts and old forgotten archives. I know that you are Satoshi, I do not want to tell anyone about this. I just wanted to say that you created weapons of mass destruction where … Read More “I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto” »
Ransomware isn’t new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the “Brain” computer virus. Now, it’s become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them — sometimes … Read More “Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin” »
The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of people’s bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the person behind Bitcoin Fog serves as an … Read More “Identifying the Person Behind Bitcoin Fog” »
Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery … Read More “Illegal Content and the Blockchain” »