Boosters of blockchain tell us that it will be an invention more significant than the Internet itself, but thus far its benefits remain largely theoretical. The utility of cryptocurrencies to drug dealers is anything but hypothetical, however, as the invention of bitcoin has enabled the flowering of dozens of online drug markets, which have exacerbated an American opioid epidemic projected to claim the lives of one million Americans by 2020.
Cryptocurrencies have also been a godsend to financial fraudsters, as a generation of would-be Jordan Belforts have flocked to these poorly understood collections of computer code to use as the subject of an endless series of pump-and-dump scams.
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