Many people have voiced concerns about the anonymity and decentralized regulation of Bitcoin leading to an open door for the criminal element. While the reasoning behind the belief is sound, Bitcoin is not the criminal dream currency that naysayers would have you believe. All of the owners of a bitcoin wallet are only referred to by an 34 character alphanumeric address. However these address do not provide the anonymity you might expect. According to Jermey Kirk of PCWorld, “Using special algorithms, researchers were able to associate large numbers of seemingly anonymous bitcoins addresses with certain major services such as exchanges and payment processors.“ The FBI has also been successful in catching criminals who would use Bitcoin for malevolent purposes. Although the FBI wouldn’t reveal how they accomplished this feat, Forbes magazine did report the following: ‘The FBI official wouldn’t say how the agency had determined that the Bitcoin “wallet”–a collection of Bitcoins at a single address in the Bitcoin network–belonged to Ulbricht, but that it was sure they were his. “This is his wallet,” said the FBI official. “We seized this from DPR,” the official added, referring to the pseudonym “the Dread Pirate Roberts,” which prosecutors say Ulbricht allegedly used while running the Silk Road (Greenberg).’ The reason Bitcoin does not provide the anonymity you might expect is because of its very nature. The same features of Bitcoin that allow for it to be simultaneously secure and decentralized are what defeat its own anonymity. At the heart of Bitcoin is that all transactions are public. Each transaction is recorded and shared by many privately managed, but publicly accessible, databases called “Blockchains.

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Bitcoin may not provide anonymity, but there are still a number of ways users could successfully manipulate the system without necessarily getting caught. If a merchant doesn’t wait for transaction confirmation, bit coins can be double spent by attacker(s) quickly sending two conflicting transactions into the network or a user could pre-mine one transaction into a block and then spend the same coins before releasing the block into the block chain (Bonadonna, 2013). The Bible warns that this type of trickery will exist in the world similar to the serpent tricking Eve (Genesis 3:1, New Standard Revised Version).
It’s hard to deny that there are indeed security issues with bitcoin as well as potential software issues if the quick growth continues due clogging of the network (Walsh, 2015). However, a recurring theme is the fact that these security breaches and issues have less to do with the protocol itself, and more to do with the people and services handling and storing these bitcoins. There is a need for appropriate and independently audited safety measures for custodians alongside with more transparency and accountability. Such measures may be what bitcoin needs if it wants to survive long into the future while maintaining its credibility and security. But what decisions are made waits to be seen.

E. Bonadonna. (2013, March) Bitcoin and the double-spending problem [Web log post] Retrieved from https://blogs.cornell.edu/info4220/2013/03/29/bitcoin-and-the-double-spending-problem/

R. Walsh (2015, May 14) The problem with bitcoin blockchain, and why its causing debate [Web log post] Retrieved from https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/18845/the-problem-with-the-bitcoin-blockchain/