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While cryptocurrency has plenty of legitimate uses, it has been identified as a payment method in transactions involving illegal drugs, firearms, explosives, human trafficking, child sex and child pornography. Law enforcement needs to know something about cryptocurrency because it has become the payment of choice for many criminal activities. Why should a law enforcement officer learn about cryptocurrency? Because the system is “distributed” and “de-centralized,” there is no central ledger or single computer system that can be shut down to kill it. Blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions are sometimes referred to as “ trustless” transactions because there is no single human intermediary that needs to be trusted – instead that “trust” is assigned to the blockchain. Until the advent of cryptocurrency, banks have served the trusted role of intermediary between two parties in a financial transaction-vouching for who the parties are and that the money is valid. This allows an anonymous exchange of value. What does this mean in English? While everyone, including an uninvolved party, can verify that a cryptocurrency transaction took place, no one can link the sender and receiver to a human being since the blockchain, or ledger, only records the transaction information and not personally identifiable information. Bitcoin is the most familiar of these digital currencies, but there are hundreds of others. Most cryptocurrencies (also called “digital tokens”) are based on a based upon an open, distributed technology called blockchain which can be used for many other applications. Unlike “real” money issued by a government (also called fiat money), cryptocurrency is a digital asset that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable, anonymous and permanent way. Blockchain Intelligence Group comments on perception that cryptocurrencies are not secure