Search results

This paper aims to analyze the money laundering process itself, how cryptocurrencies have been integrated into this process, and how regulatory and government bodies are responding to this new form of currency.

This paper is a theoretical paper that discusses cryptocurrencies and their role in the money laundering process.

Cryptocurrencies eliminate the need for intermediary financial institutions and allow direct peer-to-peer financial transactions. Because of the anonymity introduced through blockchain, cryptocurrencies have been favored by the darknet and other criminal networks.

Cryptocurrencies are a nascent form of money that first arose with the creation of bitcoin in 2009. This form of purely digital currency was meant as a direct competitor to government-backed fiat currency that are controlled by the central banking system. The paper adds to the recent discussions and debate on cryptocurrencies by suggesting additional regulation to prevent their use in money laundering and corruption schemes.

It is fascinating to think about the growth of the literature on the informal economy since Hart and Ferman and Ferman first considered the problem in very different contexts in the early 1970's. In fact some intellectual history would probably be appealing for students of this literature. Irrespective of the knowledge gained from conducting an intellectual history, social scientists should be aware that many, if not most, of the empirical and theoretical problems they study have roots in different philosophical problems (Leaf, 1979). The “informal” economy is no exception. To situate the following collection of articles on the informal economy in one useful philosophical context, I will discuss in this introduction two distinct strategies of social science investigation. Having spelled out these strategies, I will then consider how each of the papers stands in relation to them.