I’ve been studying cryptocurrencies and the dude-bro, Pepe-infested, low-oxygen, sour and fetid swamp-culture that has sprung up around it. Crypto-enthusiasm is a big part of the 4-chan and 8-chan gestalt and its libertarian, anti-government features make it appealing to the young and disaffected (largely among men). Finally, the Ron Paul/anti-Federal Reserve/sound money faction of United States political culture finds a lot to love in crypto. In short, even though there are strong arguments for decentralized and psuedo-anonymized crypto-currencies, it doesn’t take very long to feel utterly filthy once you dive into crypto-culture.
Of course, there are thousands — or perhaps millions — of crypto-enthusiasts that do not fit the mold I’ve crafted, but this doesn’t help:
United States law enforcement agencies analyzed Bitcoin (BTC) transactions to locate and subsequently shut down a global child pornography site.
Per an Oct. 16 press release, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the shutdown of the largest-to-date child sexual exploitation market called Welcome to Video which was operated by South Korean national, Jong Woo Son. The site offered child pornography videos for sale using Bitcoin.
[...]
An analysis of the server indicated that each user had received a unique Bitcoin address upon registration on the website, which eventually amounted to over one million Bitcoin addresses and thus not least than one million users.
[...]
As a result of the investigation, authorities seized nearly eight terabytes of child pornography videos, which makes it one of the largest such confiscations. 337 people were arrested in connection with the ring. 23 of the site’s victims were rescued in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Let’s do the math on that…
One million users, out of about 7 billion people in the world. Considering more than ½ the people alive are women, and I doubt that more than a handful are consumers of kiddie-porn, what we’re looking at is about 1 out of every 3,500 men established an account on a platform exclusively devoted to selling child pornography using crypto as a medium of exchange.
But wait, it gets worse…
How many people do you think are well-versed in the intricacies of purchasing, maintaining and exchanging bitcoin? And how many of them do you think live in impoverished areas of the world like Bangladesh, India, rural China, Africa, etc? Common sense tells us these folks aren’t exchanging crypto for child-porn, so the concentration of deviants must be much higher in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and other affluent areas of the world.
I was just stunned. One million crypto accounts established for kiddie-porn consumers.
That’s fucking frightening.