The Spectre of Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Etherium, etc.) is quite possibly the most damaging, least useful, most reprehensible technological development of the past 20 years – which is definitely saying something given the rise of “social media”. While cryptocurrency advocates continually espouse benefits such as transactional anonymity, increased access to financial services, and financial security, the reality is that the combination of (relatively) low penetration and high friction translating cryptocurrency into actual useful currency means any such benefits are ephemeral at best and nonexistent at worst.

On the subject of availability (and arguably security), East Africa has had the US and the rest of the world beat for some time thanks to Kenya-founded M-Pesa. The mobile payment platform – which functions on devices from modern smartphones to legacy Nokia candybar devices – revolutionized banking and related services throughout Eastern Africa. Along with other developments such as microfinance and similar offerings, financial services (originating within the “global south”) have seemingly had no problems developing solutions for the so-called “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” with no assistance from Silly Con Valley techbros and related, other entities.

From a privacy standpoint, noted charlatans and traitors thought leaders and public figures such as Edward Snowden have noted the fundamental lack of privacy within blockchain-based currencies. While wallet creation and mining allow for initial anonymity at the point of inception, the nature of blockchain-based transactions means the entire system is founded upon having a permanent (and traceable) record of transactions to a specific entity. So any degree of anonymity is completely dependent upon the operational security (and paranoia) of the wallet owner to ensure that their store of cryptocurrency does not collide with their “in real life” identity.

So, what entities actually benefit from cryptocurrency?

Well, based on existing activity, two distinct entities come to mind: first, criminal entities using cryptocurrency frameworks as the basis for collecting payments as part of ransomware; second, the North Korean regime which has leveraged such financial mechanisms to fund nuclear weapons programs. One additional entity might be individuals seeking to purchase illegal drugs via the Internet (as opposed to what some of us had to do “back in the day”: find a friendly drug dealer and talk to them on a regular basis), but in the grand scheme of things this is irrelevant. The fact that the cryptocurrency “revolution” has simultaneously fueled criminal enterprises targeting, among other entities, municipal governments and nuclear proliferation would appear to speak little for such a financial instrument.

But we haven’t even approached the possible worst impacts of cryptocurrency! Given that cryptocurrency requires generation via computationally-intensive mathematical operations, an entire new industry has emerged in the past five years: cryptocurrency mining. While potentially profitable at the emergence of cryptocurrencies, the nature of the blockchain means subsequent calculations have become ever more complex and intensive over time. Thus, the computational power (and resulting energy) necessary to produce one Bitcoin today (late 2019) versus several years ago has increased dramatically. As a result, cryptocurrency mining has become increasingly energy intensive and may have undermined all existing efforts to reduce emissions to lessen the impact of future climate change.

At this point, cryptocurrency has achieved the following effects: enabling nuclear proliferation, substantially contributing to the death of planet Earth, while enabling the pseudo-anonymous purchase of socially unacceptable items such as illegal drugs. Overall, the utility balance here appears dramatically skewed toward the negative – yet there is seemingly nothing to do about this situation.

However, that view may be incorrect. The modern internet has featured multiple self-propagating malware families from the (seemingly) benign (Conficker) through the disastrous (WannaCry). While we decry malware in general and self-propagating items especially, perhaps sometimes malware-like behavior can be leveraged for good intentions. One example would be the historic Welchia worm which leveraged a vulnerability to both remove malware and then (attempt to) patch impacted systems. While the results were not always perfect, the intentions were quite clear: to leverage malware-like functionality for a (presumably) good cause.

Given the overwhelming negative effects of cryptocurrency with respect to global social and environmental standards and its inability to solve any meaningful problems of broad social interest, I would posit that it is not merely ethically acceptable but potentially morally necessary to explore means to leverage malware-like functionality to eliminate the scourge of cryptocurrency. The environmental impact of mining operations alone would indicate that continued cryptocurrency operations represents a fundamental risk to the survival of humanity – combined with the mediums’ support for illicit and dangerous activities, such a stance becomes even more defensible.

With the background above, I posit that developing a mechanism to disrupt, degrade, or wipe cryptocurrency elements – from miners to wallets – is not merely ethically permissible but almost necessary for the continued existence of the human species. While various entities invest time, effort, and resources into developing exploits for remote doorbells or the latest IoT nonsense, I sincerely hope that some enterprising individual – possessing more robust knowledge on exploit development and vulnerability analysis than I – is working to determine fundamental weaknesses within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Once identified, weaponizing in a self-spreading manner so as to eliminate the entire field of cryptocurrencies would mark a glorious day for humanity.

While various individuals – from ransomware authors to online drug dealers to the DPRK nuclear program – would decry such a development, overall humanity would seem better off. Rather than investing in over-engineered, resource-intensive solutions to problems that may not even exist, we (the “global north”) might adopt a bit of humility and learn from those in truly limited circumstances to see how problems of financial market access and availability have been solved – such as M-PESA and related projects – outside of our normal area of operations. In the meantime, the death of cryptocurrencies cannot come soon enough, if not for the well-being of humanity, than for the survivability of the planet.