How can you support your favorite cybercriminals?Donate some BitCoins, the digital, peer-to-peer e-currency that's being heralded by "libertarians, geeks, businesspeople, and drug kingpins" as The Guardian eloquently puts it.
Last Monday, shortly after anonymous hacker group LulzSec took down another Sony property, it tweeted, "Someone just sent over $7200 worth of BitCoins. Whoever you are...Thank you..." On June 2, LulzSec tweeted a destination for BitCoin donations.
BitCoins are a virtual currency that allow people to transact directly without a third party to process the transactions. Unlike other forms of currency, there is a finite amount of BitCoins on the Internets: 21 million tokens, according to the BitCoin website. Completely deregulated and self-monitored, the BTC market is a libertarian's delight. At 10 a.m. ET Monday, Mt. Gox (the largest BitCoin exchange) valued one BitCoin at $21. The value of the currency is highly volatile, however. Last "Black Friday" the value dropped a third, Daily Tech reported.
The idea was manifested by a team of software engineers and computer scientists, based on a 2009 academic paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite some media reports, BTC isn't completely anonymous, since every transaction comes from a unique IP address anyway. However, they can be used at anonymous online marketplaces, the biggest being Silk Road.
The BitCoin market has been around for over a year, but the tweet from LulzSec coincided with a letter sent from two senators to the Drug Enforcement Administration, calling attention to the use of BitCoin to purchase narcotics at Silk Road.
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