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.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.We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity.Instead democratizing currency, we're democratizing large scale crime. Previously only large organized crime organizations could perform such an attack. Now, almost anyone can.