LongHash Blockchain Information (ID: Kyle Torpey)

In 2018, high school student god god pretended to be a policeman on Twitter, used a hacking program to steal private information of underage girls, then threatened to force women to shoot various sexual exploitation videos, and gradually strengthened the control of victims. During this period, god god opened several chat rooms on Telegram, chat rooms are also called "rooms", and god god released pornographic content in these rooms, hence the name of Room N incident.

After the disappearance of the "Watch man", a man named "Doctor" started running the room, and was widely sought after for the extreme scale of the video in the room. Moreover, "Doctor" also divides users into different payment levels. The payment standards are 200,000, 600,000, and 1.5 million won (equivalent to 1,149 yuan, 3,448 yuan, and 8,620 yuan). Only Bitcoin, Monero Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for payment. According to South Korean media reports, "Doctor" has a total of 513 cryptocurrency wallets, and the amount of cryptocurrency in the verified personal cryptocurrency wallet used to collect fees in Telegram is as high as 3.2 billion won.

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Anonymity in cryptocurrencies

We can see that "Doctor" wanted to hide from the government through good "anonymity" from the very beginning of running the "room". He chose Telegram, an end-to-end encryption software, which can to a certain extent avoid the government's concerns about its release. Content censorship; on the other hand, for the charging part, "Doctor" chooses cryptocurrency, hoping to use the good anonymity of cryptocurrency to avoid the government from checking him from the funding side. But it was also because he did not know much about cryptocurrencies and chose Bitcoin as the payment medium. It was this decision that allowed the police to trace back the transaction history, and finally tracked down the real identity of the "doctor" and other information and successfully caught the blogger.

Many people's first impression of cryptocurrencies is that they have good anonymity, but in fact most cryptocurrencies on the existing market do not have real anonymity.

In the case of Bitcoin, the anonymity of Bitcoin is actually "pseudo-anonymity". In today's payment system, banks play the lowest role, and the policy supervision of banks requires banks to implement KYC policies, and can only open accounts with customers' real-name certificates. Any third-party payment software is actually based on the banking system. Fund transfer activities are carried out on a basis. In contrast, Bitcoin does not require KYC, and users can arbitrarily generate countless Bitcoin wallets for receiving and sending Bitcoin. From this point of view, the address of Bitcoin is actually inseparable from the personal identity in the physical world, which means that you do not need to bind your personal information to own a Bitcoin wallet, and users only need to own Bitcoin and Wallet address, you can carry out payment activities.

Monero is one of the cryptocurrencies with a very high level of anonymity. Similarly, Monero is not bound to the personal identity in the physical world, and it uses ring signature technology, which can encrypt the transfer address and payment amount, and no one can trace it to the network except the transaction parties. trading activity on.

Due to the anonymity of cryptocurrency, it is highly respected in the dark web where money laundering, drugs, and gun transactions are rampant, and these black industries have also cast a shadow on the development and growth of cryptocurrency. According to related reports, Bitcoin is still the most selected cryptocurrency on the dark web, followed by Monero. Take the "Silk Road" as an example. Within two years from its establishment to its destruction, it generated 9.5 million bitcoin transactions, accounting for more than 80% of the total bitcoin at that time. Not long ago, the data of Weibo users was leaked, and the data of nearly 500 million users were sold on the dark web and Telegram.

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Transparency or privacy, that is the question?

With the continuous development and penetration of the Internet, the digital world has become another world parallel to the physical world, and more and more people's activities take place in the digital world. In the future, people's activities in the digital world will definitely occupy people's lives. Most of them, and payment behavior will become one of the core issues people face in privacy protection in the digital world.

From the perspective of the payment system in the world today, banks firmly grasp the bottom layer of the system, and all payment behaviors are based on the banking system. The third-party payment applications such as PayPal and Apple Pay that people use today capture users through the convenience of upper-level applications. When users use these third-party payment applications, they also hand over their payment privacy to these giants company. With the blessing of big data and artificial intelligence, these third-party payment giants have mastered a huge amount of financial payment behavior data of users, and can describe the financial payment portrait of users in detail, so these institutions have launched a lot of financial products, For example, credit consumer products like credit cards, investment and wealth management, etc. Just imagine, in the future, when most of people's activities are in the digital world, do we still have privacy? Whether these giant companies will use our privacy data to mine, gain insight into human nature, and recommend products that seem to be "irresistible" to us, and this continuous cycle will lead to giant companies getting bigger and bigger, and "hold our hands firmly". Life"?

Many geeks have thought about these issues and are constantly fighting for people's privacy. Protecting people's privacy is also one of the reasons behind Bitcoin. Just like every coin has two sides, privacy protection also has its other side.

LongHashJudging from this "room N incident", privacy has also given birth to the dark side of human nature. And this is just a small incident in the "dark world", and there are more cruel and violent unknown information flooding the dark web. According to relevant data, dark web information accounts for more than 90% of all network information. As mentioned above, cryptocurrencies also play an important role on the dark web, where they are used as a payment medium for money laundering, drugs, pornography and other activities, including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero. Cryptocurrencies are neutral, and we cannot prevent criminals from using cryptocurrencies to engage in illegal and criminal activities. Although cryptocurrencies bring about a "freer" world free from regulation, the use of cryptocurrencies by criminals in the black industry has also made the "freer world and better world" that the creators of cryptocurrencies yearn for far from. We are farther. To this end, regulatory agencies are also constantly introducing regulatory policies for cryptocurrencies.