US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation.<p>This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing.<p>We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity.<p>Instead democratizing currency, we're democratizing large scale crime. Previously only large organized crime organizations could perform such an attack. Now, almost anyone can.