Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed through Cryptocurrencies?
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies are among the largest unregulated markets in the world. We find that approximately one-quarter of bitcoin users are involved in illegal activity. We estimate that around $76 billion of illegal activity per year involve bitcoin (46% of bitcoin transactions), which is close to the scale of the U.S. and European markets for illegal drugs. The illegal share of bitcoin activity declines with mainstream interest in bitcoin and with the emergence of more opaque cryptocurrencies. The techniques developed in this paper have applications in cryptocurrency surveillance. Our findings suggest that cryptocurrencies are transforming the black markets by enabling “black e-commerce.” Received June 1, 2017; editorial decision December 8, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Review of Financial Studies
- Topic
- Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Field
- Computer Science
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Australian Research Council
- Keywords
- CryptocurrencyThe InternetBusinessMainstreamCommerceQuarter (Canadian coin)Internet privacyComputer securityComputer scienceLawPolitical scienceGeographyWorld Wide Web
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes