IS BITCOIN BEING ATTACKED OR ADVERTISED FOR DRUG TRANSACTIONS?

Last week Max Keiser was interviewed on The Alex Jones Show and Keiser was chuffed, to say the least, about Bitcoin, proclaiming victory!

Today there is an article in The Guardian about the use of Bitcoin for the purchase of illegal drugs.

Readers of this blog should by now be aware that I consider a cashless society one of the goals of a future society, and believed that due to the current criminality of drug and porn and whatever goes purchasing that it would be difficult for such activities to continue in a cashless society, unless absolutely everything was legal, otherwise all financial transactions would be traceable.

But now with Bitcoin that might not be the case...

I still cannot decide whether this article by The Guardian is hit, protection or advertisement.

Perhaps the killer fact in this article is that despite everyone claiming to know how a particular website operates the 'authorities' have no clue or power stop it being used to sell drugs!

Hmmmm.

Mark Johnson* rifles through his mail as he gets home from work. Among the usual bills is a small padded envelope. Though it doesn't have his name on, it's the package he's most interested in: inside lie two grams of, he hopes, relatively pure MDMA.

Johnson has no idea who has sent him the envelope: he has never met his dealer, and never will. The delivery was facilitated through a website called Silk Road, an underground eBay-like site which has become the core marketplace for buying and selling drugs online – and despite law enforcement authorities across the world being fully aware of its operation they have, so far, been powerless to stop it.

...In his paper, Christin raised the possibility that authorities might instead try to disrupt Silk Road's other protection: its use of the anonymous, stateless, encrypted online currency known as Bitcoin. But that's a task that's only getting harder.

Bitcoins are a currency controlled by no government, no company, and no group, but rather by maths: a series of complex cryptographic calculations rule how many Bitcoins are in existence and how many are traded.

[source : Silk Road: the online drug marketplace that officials seem powerless to stop, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/22/silk-road-online-drug-marketplace, 22nd March 2013]