It was active way before bitcoin existed and their primary currency was Liberty Reserve Dollars. You could deposit via western union or other cash deposit methods and transfer funds internationally with no questions. Bitcoin was added as another method fairly late on.

LR just provided the ledger, you bought in and cashed out through 3rd party exchangers who were supposed to do all the KYC checking. LR also would freeze any account that moved more than some arbitrary amount that I can't remember but you could open pretty much unlimited accounts with slightly different info to keep under the limits. They weren't as bad as the DoJ claims unless there was private side dealing they discovered.

When the exchangers started allowing Visa/MC ATM card loads is when all the org crime flocked to LR to cash out their stolen db sales and attention from DoJ started.

> You could open an account with an email address, and no other documentation, deposit bitcoins, and then pull out your holdings in the form of cash or gold.

That alone is not a bad thing. Why shouldn't you have freedom and privacy with your money?

I know very well that draconian banking control is how some crimes are solved or some crimes avoided. That's how it works currently, but it doesn't have to be that way. Was the world really awash in crime before Know Your Customer, Currency Transaction Reporting, and all the other controls came into existence in the last 30 years?

Bureaucratic control grows exponentially.

I don't believe it has to be tied to specific trends in crime. Only a few random but well covered stories of crime is enough to persuade the public into handing over more power and calling for new stronger laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

It's very common practise to publish a brief version of the story if it's breaking news, many respected sites do it, TV news does its equivalent, etc.

Publishing a fleshed out version of the story after doing the brief "BREAKING NEWS" one (like the NYT usually does, for example) is very different from backfilling the original brief entry, which is what commenter is accusing Bloomberg of doing.

Bitcoin was just staring out back then and was barely worth anything, also there was no Bitcoin deposit option one had to use exchangers back then, I lost 700 usd back then after getting paid for a design job,should have asked for bitcoin and be a millionaire now. Lr were more reliable than PayPal who hate freelancers.