From: FinTech Global
Darknet users have increased the value of their bitcoin transactions, according to new research from Bitfury, the emerging technologies company.
The research found that the value of the cryptocurrency used in the seedier parts of the web had increased by 65% in the first three months of this year, compared to the same period in 2019.
At the same time though, the amount of bitcoin decreased.
This was partly due to the fact that the value of bitcoin has increased and that darknet entities are transferring more money between them. The growing popularity of the cryptocurrency also contributed to the rise.
The amount of bitcoin sent from darknet entities to so-called mixers, services used to mix potentially identifiable or tainted cryptocurrency funds with others to make it harder to track their origins, also grew in the period.
“It is possible that darknet users are trying to hide their bitcoin flow inside of the darknet, avoiding detection of their activities,” Bitfury said. “This also encourages darknet services to cooperate and grow their revenue internally.”
The research comes as the debate about bitcoin being used for more murky purposes have been reignited in the aftermath of the big Twitter hack this week. The hack saw Twitter’s cybersecurity being breached in a social engineering attack, which in turn gave the bad actors access to several high-profile accounts. The cyber criminals then used this access to launch a bitcoin scam.
Bitcoin stakeholders now worry that the scam will soil the cryptocurrency’s reputation further, with it already suffering from reports about how criminals use cryptocurrencies to launder money or, as in the infamous OneCoin case, form the centre of elaborate multi-million scams.
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