Europol Executive Director: criminals start to use altcoins more often than Bitcoin

The Executive Director of Europol has confirmed what some media outlets wrote about the change of popularity of Bitcoin among criminal syndicates around the world. He wrote on his Twitter:

We’ll see a progressive shift in 2018 towards criminal use of cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, making it generally more challenging for law enforcement to counter https://t.co/CAzr4spnK4

— Rob Wainwright (@rwainwright67) 2 января 2018 г.

There were times when the general public cared nothing for Bitcoin, and only people really interested in programming used it for payments or invested in it. Some foresaw the rise of Bitcoin almost from the start, like the Winklevoss brothers, but there are not much people who outright saw the future success of it and managed not to lose funds after all these 9 years. Hackers, criminals and other people conducting shady activities, however, quickly recognized that Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme and learned to establish their illicit financial flows in this ecosystem.

However, over time it became obvious that Bitcoin is not as anonymous as it was considered: transactions are actually open for everyone to see, and by collecting the bits of information around Darknet websites one can even deanonymize some participants of human trafficking after matching mobile phone numbers with Bitcoin wallet addresses. Monero, however, is another story: its blockchain is much less transparent, with a system of anonymization tools which, in the most notable instance, allowed the WannaCry hackers to hide tracks.