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How Malign Actors Leverage Cryptocurrency

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How Malign Actors Leverage Cryptocurrency President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Vladimir Putin discussed bilateral relations and measures to stabilize oil market, Beijing, September 3, 2015 (President of Russia Web site) Evasive Maneuvers How Malign Actors Leverage Cryptocurrency By Sara Dudley, Travis Pond, Ryan Roseberry, and Shawn Carden All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation. —JOHN ADAMS, LetteR TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUGUST 25, 1787 he U.S. National Defense Strat- creative solutions. The emergence of egy outlines a fundamental cryptocurrencies represents a novel competition between free and frontier that diminishes U.S. compara- Colonel Sara Dudley, USA, is assigned to Joint T Special Operations Command. Lieutenant Colonel open societies and revisionist powers tive advantage in mapping funding to Travis Pond, USAF, is the Program Acquisition and rogue regimes. These powers threat networks worldwide. By disrupt- Evaluator at the Department of Defense Office of and regimes frequently act below the ing the visibility and control present the Inspector General. Colonel Ryan Roseberry, USA, is an Intelligence Officer assigned to George threshold of war, enabled by recent within the traditional centralized C. Marshall Center. Colonel Shawn Carden, USA, technological advances. Effective international banking system, the use is the Director of Future Operations at U.S. Army responses to these advances demand of cryptocurrencies negates the ability Cyber Command G35. 58 Features / How Malign Actors Leverage Cryptocurrency JFQ 92, 1st Quarter 2019 for U.S. personnel to monitor and leader, Bitcoin, in 2009.2 All other avail- corruption pertaining to monetary restrict funding sources. The ability able cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin transactions because the ledger is public to follow the money is at risk based on bears the generic label of “altcoin,” that and exists in multiple duplicate copies.3 peer-to-peer exchange of encrypted is, an alternative to Bitcoin, but operates The secure, encrypted, transparent, currencies. To probe this vulnerability, on similar open-source code. Crucially, and distributed copies of the block- explanations of blockchain technologies these currencies disrupt standard banking chain underlying cryptocurrency offer and cryptocurrencies show how adver- systems by introducing a means to es- a dramatically new model for financial saries use the technology to circumvent tablish peer-to-peer transactions without transactions. financial market control and sanction centralized ledger controls. While the international financial com- protocols. The U.S. Government will Traditionally, a ledger system that munity certainly has shown both intrigue need to act to mitigate the current risk resided in one location stored the total and aversion to the potential disruptions in poorly governed cryptocurrency of debits or credits transferred between in world monetary markets, distributed market places. individuals exchanging currency. While ledger technology also introduces chal- handwritten log books have given way to lenges pertaining to national security. The Explaining Cryptocurrency digital recordkeeping, middlemen (finan- presence of various middlemen, such as The global economic system has ben- cial institutions) maintain these databases financial institutions, afforded govern- efited substantially from the establish- in central locations for easy tracking. ments the ability to track and trace malign ment of the free market system since However, this traditional method of activity through the traditional financial the end of World War II. In 1944, the currency exchange is vulnerable to cyber system ledgers. With cryptocurrencies, Bretton Woods Agreement established hacking as well as software and hardware reputable banks no longer validate an the U.S. dollar (USD) as the world’s malfunctions. The blockchain application individual’s credentials and record his in- reserve currency, providing stability and addresses this vulnerability by generating formation with each transaction. Rather, liquidity that enabled significant growth a ledger of transactions verified, vali- anonymity in cryptocurrencies protects in international trade. At that time, the dated, and stored by a widely distributed point-to-point transactions captured USD was backed by U.S. gold reserves, network of autonomous peer computer between digitized wallets and encryp- which were the largest in the world.1 systems (called mining computers). tion keys. This change in the traditional In 1971, President Richard Nixon Various mining computers participate process for managing financial transac- eliminated the exchangeability of USD in these blockchains by confirming the tions undermines regulatory anti–money for gold, but the strength of the U.S. transaction records between participant laundering efforts performed by financial economy and the norms of international ledgers, and in doing so generate their institutions, which are intended to thwart trade created over the previous 20-plus own profit. A computing source compiles players attempting to skirt sanctions and years allowed the USD to retain its and produces the next block of trans- finance terror groups. While perhaps status as the world’s reserve currency. actions and mines (or gains) a digital not immediately obvious to the casual The market confidence in the U.S. currency token as reward for the effort observer, nonstate actor use and increas- economy, along with centralized gov- of solving algorithms. Following the ing state actor pursuit of cryptocurrencies ernmental monetary policy, continue addition of a verified block (combined extend the competitive space into the in- to support the valuation of the USD individual transactions), all computers ternational financial domain and spotlight internationally. Decentralized crypto- across the network store the updated cryptocurrency as a national security issue currencies threaten to undermine the database on the distributed blockchain that should concern the Department dominance of the USD due to the ways ledger. of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence in which they can subvert the global The open (public) blockchain led- Community.4 financial system. ger effectively resides on thousands of The rapid growth of weakly regu- A digital or virtual currency maintains computers participating in the minute- lated financial and technology markets three basic pieces: an encryption used to by-minute validation of the blockchain creates vulnerabilities for safeguarding secure each coin, a mathematical proof- itself. In effect, the distributed blockchain the international financial system from of-work used to validate each coin’s stores and verifies the ledger and, in malign actors. Hence, the nexus of crime, legitimacy, and a blockchain (database) doing so, eliminates excess transaction corruption, and terrorism finds refuge in that records transactions. The blockchain fees and other negative externalities as- these emergent financial systems.5 Aside records a transaction history and posts it sociated with single-ledger repositories, from the benefits of cryptocurrencies, to a distributed ledger that creates data for example, the middleman, hacking, which include providing an attractive integrity and visibility to all participants. and corruption. Championed by a re- means for malign actors to conceal il- The desire to use this technology to sup- cent World Economic Forum report, licit funding and business, and to earn port a completely free market system, not blockchain technology allows for broader currency by mining, the technology at- tethered to any state managed currency, transparency and integrity in society, tributes alone attract malfeasance. While drove the establishment of the segment including the fight against bribery and the distributed blockchain ledger remains JFQ 92, 1st Quarter 2019 Dudley et al. 59 tic effect that allows rogue actors to cooperate in a secondary value transfer market impervious to the established world economic order. In doing so, cryptocurrencies present a viable means to unseat the USD as the recognized global reserve currency. Upsetting the World Financial System and Unseating the USD as World Currency. While the USD has remained the dominant reserve currency follow- ing Bretton Woods, two nations have challenged the USD’s dominance. In 2009, China and Russia called for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to develop a new global currency, arguing that inflation and deficit spending in the United States would devalue reserves held in USD.6 Today, the USD is still the most widely held reserve currency, and nearly two-thirds of all international trade is done in USD. Conducting trade in USD requires the use of the U.S. banking Mining kit based on golden nonce chip, May 20, 2015 (Alexandr Gromov) system to support the transactions, and all those transactions are subject to U.S. laws resistant to cyber criminals, the storage integrity of financial exchange. The ano- intended to protect international financial of the digital coins (that is, private key nymity of use, low barriers to entry, and markets from bad actors. National secu- encryptions) remains a system weakness. weak regulation and limited legal jurisdic- rity legislation that impacts the financial While pointed out earlier that tradi- tion in the cryptocurrency marketplace system includes anti–money
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