What evil has the encrypted digital currency Bitcoin done over the years? Why is it frequently used in various illegal transactions? You may know that when Huazhu Hotels and SF Express data were leaked, you should have heard this statement: your information is being sold on the dark web at a low price. The price of Bitcoin in 2013 (115$-1200$), 2 Bitcoins can buy hundreds of millions of pieces of data. But you may not know that except for information and data, all evil in the world is clearly priced on the dark web.
Today, the editor will take you to learn about some dark webs based on anonymous encrypted digital currencies and blockchain technology that you don’t know. A human life is only worth 5 Bitcoins, and 10 Bitcoins can buy a customized killing game night. The virtual currency with its own "anonymity" coincides with the needs of the dark web and has become an indispensable and important fuel for the dark web.
The Secret History of Virtual Currency: The Dark Web was once the largest source of value for Bitcoin
The dark web is also called the deep web or the invisible web. To put it simply, it is a website that we cannot search with conventional search engines. The number of domain names is 400 to 500 times that of the surface network. Visitors will not leave any traces. Virtual currency fits perfectly with its encryption and security. The dark web has facilitated dark web transactions and spawned more criminal or money laundering activities.
Most people first learned about the dark web and virtual currencies from the exposure of the “Silk Road”. Weapons, drugs, slaves, smuggling, raptors, child pornography, and hired killers are all displayed on the website, and Bitcoin is the only currency allowed.
The anonymity of Bitcoin, coupled with the "onion routing" used by websites, makes it extremely difficult for the police to find the IP address by passing through layers of defenses like peeling an onion. Therefore, the Silk Road relied on its powerful secrecy Sex became famous overnight.
In the end, the FBI successfully arrested the founder of Silk Road in October 2013 by sending undercover agents and investigating IP leaks. In these two years, Silk Road earned US$7.7 billion and circulated more than 9.5 million Bitcoins, accounting for 80% of the Bitcoin circulation at that time. It can be said that the most phenomenal application of blockchain has already appeared: virtual currency began to have circulation value from the underground market of the dark web.
Darknet surge: virtual currency becomes a criminal bargaining chip
The "economic powerhouses" on the dark web are enough to support the defense line of virtual currency value. In 2014, the average daily Bitcoin transaction volume on the six major darknets reached US$650,000, while the average daily transaction volume of BitPay, the world's first formal Bitcoin payment provider, was only US$435,000.
As the price of Bitcoin skyrockets, transaction fees continue to be high. Litecoin, which has similar functions to Bitcoin but has better transaction speed and fee prices, briefly occupied the mainstream of darknet transactions. However, due to privacy issues, it was quickly replaced by Monero.
Monero has added technologies such as ring signatures and obfuscated addresses to increase anonymity. This "invisible" function makes it impossible for people to judge the flow of funds, and even if the address is tracked, it cannot be traced back to the original holder. In July 2017, when Alpha Bay, the largest darknet market, was seized, 160,500 Bitcoins, 258,300 Ethereums, and 369,100 Zcash were all confiscated, but only Monero, an unknown amount due to the lack of private keys. . Monero, which even the U.S. Army and the National Security Agency were helpless to do anything about, was once sought after by darknet traders.
But Monero’s frequent hard forks have also become a time bomb in darknet payments, so the Dash application was born. The anonymity of Dash is achieved through currency mixing technology, which means that all tokens from several transactions are mixed together and then sent to different payees. In this way, every time the currency is mixed, the transaction originator will be traced. The difficulty of square addresses increases exponentially. As a result, Dash has become a new choice for darknet transactions.
It is worth mentioning that the value of virtual currencies that are frequently used in the dark web has also increased. Bitcoin has soared 3 million times in ten years, Dash increased by 8000% in 2017, and the price of Monero increased by 50% in 2016. Someone joked about this and said, "Usually, the cryptocurrencies used by drug traffickers will eventually become mainstream currencies."
Technology and Humanity: Does Blockchain Make Our Lives Better?
After tracing back the stories of virtual currencies and the dark web, it is not difficult to find some embarrassing things.
The first problem is that we are all longing for freedom after "decentralization", but only where there is control can there be so-called freedom. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, once said, "I want to create an economic simulation to let people experience what it is like to live in a world without systematic rights to use." This pursuit of ultimate freedom, speaking of it, In fact, it is no different from the vision depicted by blockchain, but is absolute freedom good?
There may be more cyber violence and dirty underground transactions, and it will be harder to convict.
Another paradox is: even if it is backed by virtual currency and coupled with the onion network of the dark web, under the supervision of the national intelligence department, as long as you have skilled blockchain technology, large transaction addresses can still be traced. Data currencies are losing their anonymity and becoming transparent, and the encryption technology that everyone has always praised seems to have been overturned and has become more or less a farce to some extent.
There is nothing new under the sun. No wonder some people can't help but lament that "blockchain and Bitcoin are just a small climax in the history of cryptography" and "no one has developed a real blockchain application in fourteen years."
Bitcoin has been around for fourteen years now. Blockchain has indeed arrived, but it has not flowed into society evenly. It is still the same as the relationship between virtual currency and the dark web a few years ago. The virtual currency that was once born out of beautiful ideals was the first to achieve maximum circulation value in darknet transactions; the blockchain technology with "decentralization" as its banner has now become a speculation for most people in order to get rich. s method. There are 100 blockchains in the eyes of 100 people.
Although the threshold for using blockchain technology has become lower and lower, under the existing cultural and government environment, "encryption" and "decentralization" still seem to be only at a very preliminary stage. Its "anonymity" has great appeal to liberals, but this attraction is still negative. It is outside the law. Projects that can meet the needs of the bottom of human nature, fill desires and accumulate capital will occupy the mainstream position in the long term. And those beautiful visions still require a lot of time to crack the existing technical bottlenecks and cryptocurrency embarrassments.
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