Comment Re:Two Bits Of Bad News... (Score 1) 92
I guess you missed this part:
The firm’s findings still contrast strongly with those put forward by three Australia-based academics, who estimated in 2019 that based on transactional data from 2009 to 2017, one-quarter of all 106 million Bitcoin users engaged in crime, and that by 2018, illicit finance accounted for around $76 billion a year, or roughly half, of all transactions in bitcoins.
Cryptocurrencies have transformed drug trafficking by enabling crime syndicates to cut out street dealers and sell directly to customers around the world through darknet markets, as well as peddle higher-quality narcotics, said Sean Foley, a finance professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and one of the report’s authors.
“Chainalysis is trying to tell us about the total consumption of cocaine in Australia by telling us about how much cocaine has been seized,” Foley said. “It’s very difficult for me to meaningfully comment on the methodology because they don’t really tell you what they do.”
