Blockchain is an online ledger that is seemingly impossible to tamper with. As ZDNet explained, the idea behind the technology is to broadcast every transaction to the community. When a majority of that community agrees that all transactions seen in the recent past are unique, those transactions are cryptographically sealed into a block.
“A chain thereby grows, each new block linked to the previously accepted history, preserving every spend ever made,” ZDNet said.
The transaction is hard or impossible to influence because rather than being stored on a single server, blockchain is distributed across the world via a network of private computers. As Marc Andreessen, co-partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in The New York Times bitcoin and blockchain “gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. That includes the potential negative consequences. As Interpol’s Christian Karam told attendees at the Black Hat Asia conference, blockchain could also be used to provide access to illicit content or malware control mechanisms that, once posted, would be hard to remove, according to Forbes.
Thankfully, the real-life examples of such blockchain abuse have been few. One saving grace of blockchain is that every transaction is recorded. Even if criminals shield their identity, they leave a digital trail that’s often of use to investigators. Chain analysis, a firm that tracks such data, has worked with the FBI, the IRS and the SEC, among other government entities in the U.S. and Europe, for this purpose, MIT Technology Review noted.
One lingering concern is the emergence of quantum computing — a technology that uses qubits instead of bits to perform unfathomably complex transactions. A hacker using quantum computing could hack blockchain, but engineers are working on countermeasures, according to the International Business Times.
Blockchain technology is so new — it has only been around for about a decade — that hackers and security pros are still working out ways to exploit and preserve the system, respectively. The proposed DoD study shows that blockchain is far enough along to be a powerful tool and a potentially powerful weapon.
However the Statistics from FBI reveals the real stats resulting from some of the investigations-:
- A Drug Cartel spends $ 70Mn on Airplanes
- A Serbian Sex Trafficker $ 40Mn on ships to smuggle victims across the Mediterranean.
- RAT (Remote Access Trojan’s) malwares which are designed to lock access to the company’s own servers have also been involved in ransom demands from a couple of Medical Device manufacturers.
- Illegal activities accounts for half of all bitcoin transactions.
- 36 Mn annual transactions worth of approx. value of 72 Bn.
Where do they go to launder their ill-gotten Bitcoin gains ? This is where the role of Crypto banker ( compensated on sliding scale) surface which is termed as cleaning in the darker world terminology.