So today the Dutch police went public with the news that they have been running Hansa since the 20th of June.
After the arrest of 2 admins in Germany the authorities decided to keep it quiet and infiltrate the marketplace. Apparently they did an excellent job because the popularity of the site grew during this period. After the closing of AlphaBay they even had to close account creation temporarily.
By secretly disabling the encryption they got valuable insights in the inner workings of the marketplace and over 1000 Bitcoins were confiscated.
English press release by Dutch police:
So after reading this and other recent news I started wondering.
We know governments are not to fond of Bitcoin. what if they keep all the bitcoins they seize and over time gain a substantial amount of the market cap, would they theoretically be able to silently kill the Bitcoin as a whole?
Although I have seen enough arguments the darkweb/tor is safe and anonymous, more and more users and websites get caught with the additional attention it has gained from government agencies. Although this is often because of human error (correlation, stupidity, etc.) the general acceptance that tor is safe is will start to break down. If this trend continues, will tor and the tor-network die altogether or will we see evolution to make it more robust against human error/ignorance?
Personally I love to see cryptocurrency getting more common in the future, but with all the negative news recently (today's major etherium hack for example) I really start doubting cryptocurrentcy will ever gain the trust of the general public.