The latest report from the National Anti-Mafia Directorate, helped to revive the debate in Italy on the improper use of cryptocurrencies by the criminal economy and terrorist organizations. According to DNA, in fact, virtual uniforms, starting from Bitcoin, would be used with great frequency by criminal gangs in order to clean up dirty capital.
The report in question, however, aroused considerable perplexity in some observers, as it does not seem to take into account the changes in the sector. For example, stating how BTC is the most used currency for payments made on the darknet, when already in 2016 Alphabay and Oasis, the main deep web markets opened the doors to currencies such as Monero and Zcash, considered better from the point of view of privacy and non-traceability.
The alarms launched in 2015 by Europol and CIA
The DNA alarm, moreover, is not new, if you think how as early as 2015, Europol warned governments that Bitcoin accounted for 40% of financial exchanges between high profile criminal and terrorist groups. The report that contained this alert had then been practically confirmed in the same year by CIA, who had pointed out how Islamic state had for its part started collecting BTC in order to to be able to support the management of Raqqa as vigorously as possible, the Syrian area that had been proclaimed the Caliphate site. A technological update that had allowed ISIS militias to enjoy an additional tool to add to the traditional hawala, an ancient system based on letters of credit born in the Middle East during the Middle Ages and to the more innovative PayPal and Money Transfer.
A more complex question than it seems at first glance
The alarms of Europol and CIA, however, seem excessive to some analysts, starting from those gathered in RAND Corporation, a Washington-based US think tank that works for the US Department of Defense, who recently said that cryptocurrencies would not be able to fully meet the needs of terrorist groups.
A statement contained in a report entitled "Terrorist Use of Cryptocurrencies: Technical and Organizational Barriers and Future Threats", in which the drafters have explained that, at least according to them, despite being actually used by terrorist groups acting globally, digital assets do not presently represent a real threat from this point of view, as they are they do not fully guarantee the necessary profiles of anonymity and security of transactions. A defect to which is added the instability that continues to characterize their prices, such as to push these organizations towards traditional money again.
If this is the situation at the moment, the analysts of RAND Corporation themselves admit that in the future their assertion could be denied by the work carried out by the development groups of the various virtual uniforms to make them more performing in terms of privacy. A job that could benefit the criminal and terrorist organizations if combined with the gaps resulting from a clear and adequate regulatory framework.
