On the morning of May 7, the management of Colonial Pipeline, the oil pipeline that supplies the east coast of the United States with gasoline, discovers a message left by hackers established in Eastern Europe: they demand a ransom of 4, 4 million dollars (3.7 million euros) to unlock this strategic pipeline. Company CEO Joseph Blount quickly decides to pay. Paying the ransom is as easy as a click. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Blount makes pay 75 bitcoins to the hackers, in exchange for an unlocking software, which proves to be insufficient.
Thus, we have found an irrefutable use for bitcoin: it is the money of crime. Faster than negotiations by classified ads in the newspapers during the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son, who was assassinated in 1932; more thrifty than the mountains of dollars buried and rotting in the estates of Pablo Escobar in Colombia; safer than an encrypted transfer, even in Panama. Quite simply, effective. For years, the FBI has urged victims of hacking not to pay a ransom, but this objection is not always followed up, as the cost of paralyzing a computer system can be considerable.
On June 9, El Salvador made bitcoin a legal currency to enable financial inclusion for thousands of people without bank accounts
Before reducing bitcoin to organized crime, it is worth taking a different perspective. That of El Salvador which, on June 9, made it a legal currency, alongside the dollar, its official currency, to allow the financial inclusion of thousands of people who do not have a bank account. Or that of Venezuela, where savings are being squeezed by hyperinflation and whose inhabitants are among the largest users of cryptocurrency in the world.
In their eyes, they represent a protection against the financial mistakes of their government, a safeguard of the right to property and a means of living in normal conditions. Bitcoin’s instability is certainly a handicap, but is it worse than a permanently depreciating bolivar? An annual inflation of 3000% is equivalent to dividing the value of money by two every ten weeks. However, the current bitcoin crash – more than 31,400 euros on June 18 – has not yet reached such a devaluation. More convenient than barter, less likely to be stolen than gold or dollars concealed under a mattress, bitcoin, in this case, is not the instrument of crime, but of freedom.
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