I mean, kind of. Kick in an open door?
Also: you mean to tell me that bitcoin works for making unstoppable, illicit transactions?!
Shocking.
Stack up minor use cases here and there (#1527191), and suddenly we're talking real money.
Also #2: government and NGO "aid" is stupid, ridiculous, wasteful, harmful and should be abolished anyway. Am I happy that some rich kleptocrats or third-world dictators steal money they shouldn't have had (and turn it into bitcoin -- as well as deposits in Swiss bank, we should note)? No, of course not. But we can hold two thoughts in our heads at once.
Despite now having been around for almost two decades, bitcoin is still struggling with use cases beyond money laundering, sex trafficking, drug selling, ransomware and number-go-up
I dunno, man, what else does it need to do?? #1551583
The National Bureau of Economic Research has just published a new paper that uses on-chain bitcoin transactions, wallet creation and off-exchange records around the time of World Bank aid disbursals to estimate how much aid money is embezzled in the recipient countries and laundered through bitcoin.
...technically, bitcoin funds don't cross borders... but whatever, let's not get bogged down in the metaphysical workings of an online-only global monetary ledger.
The paper studied crypto flows around the time of 328 aid tranches paid by the World Bank totalling $238bn across 93 countries in 2018-24. From this, the authors estimated that the “leakage” amounted to about 2-6 cents per aid dollar.
oh, knoooock me down with a feather. Dudes, that's less than the remittance/kickback of your typical aid project.
Depending on your priors, this is either a surprisingly small or surprisingly large proportion. It’s actually a smidgen lower than the 7.5 cent-per-aid-dollar that a 2022 World Bank paper estimated based on offshore banking data. But Agarwal, Jin, Prasad and Rabetti note that their estimate is only derived from bitcoin, and stablecoins have become an increasingly popular tool for money-laundering. The real sum is therefore probably larger.
From the quoted segments of the paper, this seems to be the largest/biggest theoretical problem with the whole study:
Because almost all new-wallet creation we observe is unattributable in the first place, we do not read the ratio between the anonymous and identified coefficients as a magnitude
Concluding thoughts?
For the rest of us, maybe the fact that we are blithely tolerating and in some cases even embracing a technology that enables many of the worst forms of crime should also be pertinent?
oh oh oh, you mean like the US DOLLAR?! Yeah, I agree, that fiat technology and its money-laundering capacities really should be investigated. #1480191, #1453638, #1455164 (Besides: I love money laundering: #1467656)
archive: https://archive.md/rDAfl
Robin Wigglesworth?? Dude has the name of an Ayn Rand villain. I'm putting him on The List for sure.
...I just heard him pronounce his own name on an FT podcast. It's incredible
is it like "Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge" or even the infamous "Psmith" ?
no clue about those!
No, the "ggles" just sort of meshed into a weird soft vowel-sound
they're from P.G. Wodehouse; I believe both characters named specifically to ridicule some of the more preposterous British abuses of the Latin alphabet.
Wikipedia pronounciation guides for both names are consistent with what I was told by the same folks who hoard old Wodehouse novels like patoshi coinbases.
indeed... it's very, uh, unfortunate. (Though I just read about a guy named Richard Hooker... )
He's usually worth reading (=taking seriously), though he's not always great. He has a book on bonds coming out this year, which I'll be reading!
There is also mining done with subsidized electricity in aid stations.
Obviously a refugee who shows up is not bringing their own miners... the people benefitting are probably the aid workers and/or friends who caught on to the good gossip.
It's done on a small scale, because it can't overload the infrastructure to the point where the aid station is no longer able to subsidize power.
I had a difficult time forming an opinion about such mining at first, although reached the ultimate conclusion that I'd rather have those people learning about cryptocurrencies and arguing about costs of their aid station, than just encouraging that electricity only be used for sitting around and scrolling TikTok; if ultimately the miners got caught and banned from the aid station, then that was a consequence of their greed and political failure to negotiate a beneficial arrangement.
obligatory note: I wasn't directly involved with either side of such mining activity, although heard rumours of it for a long time, and eventually spoke briefly once with a person who admitted mining that way.
TL;DR If you can't attribute the "new-wallet creation", then how do you know these contain stolen world bank aid?
Precisely my concern. I have zero clue... Without verifying (= I ain't spending time reading their shit-ass paper), I suppose they make some wishy-washy chainanalysis heuristic and pretend it works
It's always heuristics because you're not going to actually catch these guys. Any spook with an above-room-temperature IQ will tell you that that would be a bad move, because the only thing that will happen is that they'll get their kickbacks from someone else.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
The bigger point here is that the fiat aid had to be misappropriated in the first place, in order to be converted to bitcoin. How does this not count as an additional failure of their stupid program?
Have fun trying to not tolerate it, losers.
That's completely different, bruh! If they didn't have access to evil bitcoin, they wouldn't steal the funds in the first place!!
How many pallets of cash have gone missing?
I don’t see them blaming hookers and blow (which I’m assuming are typical purchases with stolen money) for the thefts.
I blame the whores, always
One of the all-time Buffet quotes was something like “When you give men money they just spend it on gambling, booze, and hookers…and then they waste the rest.”
Beautiful 🤩
https://twiiit.com/joakimbook/status/2090064418876875053