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sixes_and_sevens comments on Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit? - Less Wrong
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I have a strictly academic interest in this subject. What were you thinking of?
Well, game theory dictates that I shouldn't tell you about my really good ideas, in case I decide to use them in the future.
But there's some obvious low-hanging fruit. Prices on the silk road are significantly inflated, and the odds of drugs being intercepted in the mail are extremely low. A small marijuana grow operation (or the synthesis of more sophisticated drugs, if you have the chemical background), could turn a reasonable profit very quickly. If you can produce a high-quality product, revenue of even a very basic operation could potentially be tremendous.
There's also identity theft. You can buy credit card information using bitcoins, use the compromised credit cards to buy more bitcoins, and then discard the cards immediately. This one strikes me as less palatable to the nominally moral man than the first one. Probably more profitable, though.
If the enterprise in question has a second-mover advantage, game theory dictates it could be in your best interests to tell me your really good ideas :-)
...but not if it has a first mover advantage. I mean, aside from the 'second mouse gets the cheese' factor.
Do you know a Bitcoin exchange that takes credit cards directly, or are you imagining an intermediate step like money orders?
It looks like the one I saw in the past may have folded, as I can't find it. In which case, it might be necessary to use an intermediary, like moneygram. For that sort of large-scale credit card theft, you'd want something fast and automatable, to try to earn the maximum per-card return in the interval before the owners notice and disable them.
Looks like you may be too late. The US based Bitcoin exchange Tradehill had to shut down operations earlier this year because of this exact method of fraud. Here is a description of the modus operandi. The fraud was conducted via an intermediary payment processing service.
Interesting. Not that I was actually planning on committing large scale identity theft, mind.
For one thing, stealing bitcoins is far safer and easier than most other types of theft.