Most property crime goes unpunished in the non-internet world. An anonymous someone walked off with my bike a few years ago, a crime unpunished to this day. Does this point to a fundamental flaw?

Yeah, I think it does point to a fundamental problem in our society. Check out your local Nextdoor and I think you’ll find people calling for very harsh punishment of bike thieves.

The difference is how malleable the internet infrastructure is compared to the real world. Would ransomware have taken off like it has without bitcoin? Is there some technical change to bitcoin that could make it less attractive to bad guys?

>The difference is how malleable the internet infrastructure is compared to the real world.

Just put up cameras with facial recognition everywhere, require every citizen to have biometric IDs (face from multiple angles, fingerprints, DNA), make covering your face illegal and bam you catch like 99% of bike thieves.

>Would ransomware have taken off like it has without bitcoin?

Probably, yeah. Gift cards work well too for example (they're just not as convenient), and I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to transfer money too if you're willing to incur like 50% transaction losses.

>Is there some technical change to bitcoin that could make it less attractive to bad guys?

Bitcoin already tracks every transaction ever. You'd have to somehow prevent mixers from existing, but I'm not sure how that'd be possible.

The first ransomware payment I saw predated Bitcoin, and had the victims use a Western Union money order.

It's definitely an inhibitor for the attacker. For a start, it took days for them to get payment. The current "our Onion site will detect the payment and release keys automatically" took a human workflow, which had to impact their scale. I have no doubt some sort of mule received the payment, but it's still much more traceable if overseas LE actually wanted to investigate. And managing that mule again had to hurt scale. The amount of ransomware we see today could never have happened without Bitcoin.

Edit: that too started with an open RDP server. All these years and we're seeing the same vectors in this write up.

Do they still use Bitcoin in the face of alternatives like Monero?

Looks like it here.

Monero is much harder to purchase in US

How so? You can buy it on US exchanges like Kraken and Bittrex, until recently Poloniex.

Pointless at best and toxic to liberty at worst. Often these types of attacks come from comparatively poor nations. It costs the attackers a lot less to attempt the crime than for us to negate the crime via employees who are paid wages appropriate to our own economy. Anonymity certainly offers utility when it comes to cybercrime, but the real challenge is a resource matter not an intelligence matter.