It's an investment, it's a scam, it's a dessert topping! It's Bitcoin and the whole family of alternative payment methods. No matter what else they've done, they've enabled cybercrime. In this episode we're going to talk about some of the original Bitcoin crimes and the first time we saw its use in ransomware.

This episode was recorded before the general Crypto currency crash. The bitcoin values presented are somewhere close to the top of the market. We decided to publish it because the history hasn't changed even if the market has. Bitcoin itself isn't history though, in fact shortly before the publication of this episode the US government took the extraordinary step to sanction the bitcoin tumbler Tornado.

For those who were wondering, I did finally find a real explanation for how proof of work in Bitcoin works. The transaction data plus some padding is hashed, and the hash is mutated until the hahs starts with the required number of zeros. The system is based on an earlier system called hash cash, which was originally designed to reduce spam.