Even today, cryptocurrencies are generally perceived as just high-risk investments for millennials and Silicon Valley insiders.
However, amid all the hype and speculation, what many are failing to notice is that most decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin were created to “do something,” with the belief that cryptos have the potential to change the world as we know it.
While there are plenty of powerful use cases that imply how beneficial digital currencies could be, many are of the opinion that blockchain’s decentralized and anonymous nature makes it even more appropriate for illegal activities, including heinous crimes.
One such statement recently came up from the head of United Nation’s Cybercrime and Anti-money-laundering branch, in an interview with Australia’s ABC news. Neil Walsh, the UN officer, reportedly said that investigating child sexual abuse on the internet has become considerably harder since the advent of cryptocurrency.
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Walsh warns that the true scale of online child sexual abuse is way greater than many of us realize. realise. And cryptos have made it difficult to track and deal with these criminals that majorly include globally operated child sexual exploitation networks.
In the interview, Walsh also talks about some of the really high-risk crimes, wherein six months old and younger infants are in pay-per-view, live on online child sexual abuse streaming websites that are accepting payments via cryptocurrencies. He said,
We need to know how we try and challenge that threat and reduce the risks for kids and reduce the opportunities for criminals to get involved.
Walsh goes on bashing cryptocurrencies stating that the blockchain technology adds a new layer of secrecy on terror financing, among other money laundering activities, that works in favor of cybercriminals.
To keep our society safe, Walsh also suggested a bunch of reformatory measures. One of them is to regulate exchanges, forcing their users to reveal their identities as mandatory. He believes that following strict KYC and Anti-Money-Laundering regulations might help to manage a large amount of risk. Cryptocurrency purists and cypherpunks, though, aren’t likely to welcome Walsh’s proposal of stringent regulatory policies.
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In the end, Walsh admits that putting a global set of regulations in place for the usage of cryptocurrency demands lots of different brains. “It’s going to take technologists, policymakers, philosophers, the whole nine yards.”
