What is a Cryptocurrency And Bitcoin

The web is part of society and is shaped by society. And until society is a crime-free zone, the web won't be a crime-free zone.

So what is a cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a decentralised payment system, which basically lets people send currency to each other over the web without the need for a trusted third party such as a bank or financial institution. The transactions are cheap, and in many cases,  uniswap they're free. And also, the payments are pseudo anonymous as well.

As well as that, the main feature is that it's totally decentralised, which means that there's no single central point of authority or anything like that. The implications of this is done by everyone having a full copy of all the transactions that have ever happened with Bitcoin. This creates an incredibly resilient network, which means that no one can change or reverse or police any of the transactions.

The high level of anonymity in there means that it's very hard to trace transactions. It's not totally impossible, but it's impractical in most cases. So crime with cryptocurrency-- because you've got fast, borderless transactions, and you've got a high level of anonymity, it in theory creates a system that is ripe for exploitation. So in most cases when it's a crime online with online payment systems, then they tend to go to the authorities and, say, we can hand over this payment information or we can stop these transactions and reverse them. And none of that can happen with Bitcoin, so it makes it ripe for criminals, in theory.

In light of this, a lot of different agencies are researching into Bitcoin and looking at Bitcoin and trying to understand how it works and what they can do to police it. It's also been in the media quite a few times, and the media, being the media, like focus on the bad side of it. So they focus very heavily on the crime with it. So if there's a theft or a scam or something like that, then they tend to blame it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin users.

So the most notable is probably Silk Road, which got taken down recently, and through their $1. 2 billion worth of Bitcoins, went to pay for anything from drugs to guns to hit men to those sorts of things. And the media, again, very quickly to blame this on Bitcoins and say that it was the Bitcoin user's fault.

But there's actually very little evidence of the scale of the problem of crime with cryptocurrencies. We don't know if there's a lot or we don't know if there's a little. But despite this, people are very quick to brand it as a criminal thing, and they forget the legitimate uses, such as the fast and quick payment.