Three Letters Are Loosing the War to Two Numbers

05 Feb 2020 by Light_of_Valinor

Here's my brief review of "Chainalysis 2020 Crypto Crime Report" (again, a big shout to Kyle White).

Extract: "After a small decline in 2018, total darknet market sales grew 70% in 2019 to over $790 million worth of cryptocurrency, making it the first time sales have surpassed $600 million."

Another important indicators of expanding illegal activities pinpointed by the authors are as following:

- more than 40% of all funds leaving "darknet markets" end up in crypto-exchanges;

- the number of active dark-market has grown from 2 in 2012 to 49 in 2019;

- medium amount sent to darknet markets has dropped from $50 in 2012 to $25 in 2019 with number of individual transactions exponentially increasing from under a million to 12.5 million a year;

- two most popular types of markets are drugs and card shops (almost 40% of all stolen cards end up in China).

Authors concluded that because of those drastic shifts in tactics used by various nefarious actors (multiplying platforms and atomizing transactions) law enforces changed their strategy from going after those platforms to going after individuals.

Extracts: "Some darknet markets have begun implementing user safety features ... : many have adopted multi-signature technology ...; ... another such feature is wallet-less escrow".

Extracts: " ... we may see more darknet markets accept, or perhaps even mandate the usage of privacy coins like Monero."

Other saying, what we've started to witness is that three letters agencies after loosing technological war against hackers gradually return to old methods better described by Chinese idiom: "kill the chicken to scare the monkey".