Bitcoin, the purported digital currency of the future, made headlines yesterday. In addition to having leapt in value — one bitcoin is now worth more than $550 and growing — U.S. agencies met with a Senate committee in order to sell the idea that bitcoins are “legitimate financial instruments,” according to Bloomberg.
Representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission met with the Senate committee to explore potential “promises and risks” associated with virtual currency. However, will Bitcoin’s reputation hinder it from being widely accepted?
Bitcoins are notorious for being used on the Silk Road website in exchange for drugs, guns and murder-for-hire. They’re the perfect method of exchanging money, as the virtual currency is designed to be untraceable. Most alarming, perhaps, is the boom of the online “assassination market,” which relies on bitcoins as currency.
Forbes writer Andy Greenberg posted an article yesterday about the budding murder-for-hire market.
“Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market,” Greenberg wrote, “a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official — a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations.”
Yikes. The Assassination Market’s end goal, Greenberg reported, is to murder so many politicians that people will eventually become discouraged from taking political office, therefore reducing the U.S. to an anarchist state.
“Sanjuro didn’t actually invent the concept of an anonymous crowdfunded assassination market,” Greenberg wrote. “The idea dates back to the cypherpunk movement of the mid-1990s, whose adherents dreamt of using encryption tools to weaken the government and empower individuals.”
Greenberg also writes that crowdfunded murder via bitcoins isn’t a new concept, either.
“Other Tor-hidden websites with names like Quick Kill, Contract Killer and C’thulhu have all claimed to offer murders in exchange for bitcoin payments,” he wrote. “But none of them responded to my attempts to contact their administrators, and all required advanced payments for their services, so they may be scams.”
Obviously, a few angry, extremist libertarians with money to blow on bitcoins aren’t going to overthrow the government any time soon. However, for legal businesses who want to use Bitcoin as a cheaper way to exchange money and for black markets like Silk Road, the anonymity of bitcoin use is appealing.
The success of bitcoins is to be determined.
Time will show if Bitcoin’s reputation as the untraceable currency-of-choice for criminals will keep it from becoming a “legitimate financial instrument.”
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 11/19/2013 under the headline "Assassination, sushi and socks: Buying with Bitcoins"
