Israel Derezzes Hamas, Hezbollah TronHere’s a story I’m covering just for the “What the hell?” factor.
The Tron blockchain has overtaken Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency network most favored by groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which are designated as terror organizations by the U.S., U.K. and other jurisdictions, Reuters reported on Monday.
There has been a sharp rise in cryptocurrency seizures from Tron wallets since 2021 and a decline in those from Bitcoin wallets, Reuters’ analysis found.
Israel has made 87 such seizures from Tron wallets this year, two-thirds of the total number going back to July 2021. These include 39 from wallets the country said in June were owned by Lebanon-based Hezbollah and 26 in July from Hamas ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
“Earlier it was Bitcoin and now our data shows that these terrorist organizations tend to increasingly favor Tron,” Mriganka Pattnaik, CEO of blockchain analysis firm Merkle Science, said.
The things that jump out at me are:
Evidently there’s a cryptocurrency called “Tron,” because nothing says “Cool” quite like a 41 year old Disney movie.
• Hezbollah and Hamas have been using it, because financing an illegal terrorist network across international borders is one of the few use cases for the anonymous transactions that cryptocurrency currently supports. But that doesn’t seem to matter, since…
• Israel was still able to seize the money, which seems to suggest that whole “anonymous, untraceable” appeal of cryptocurrency has some fairly sizeable holes in it.
• Why did Team Jihad move from Bitcoin to Tron? Probably because it’s popular with paymaster Iran.
• Tron evidently is worth about 10 cents per coin, which seems slightly higher than the going rate for Dogecoin right now. Bitcoin is somewhere around $38,000.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=56509
