Of course, bitcoin changes this calculus, at least the temptation to try. It’s still not as easy as people might think to use bitcoin to move truly large amounts of money out of the system—to buy things with it, or turn it into cash. Small amounts, sure. The kind of sums that would make large-scale fraud attractive? That would be much harder without being traced. However bitcoin sure makes it more tempting to try, even for small sums. A lot of ransomware attacks aren’t for huge sums, meaning bitcoin and the cryptocurrency ecology have given ransomware a scalable business model, at least in the minds of its “entrepreneurs.” This is a very costly problem to fix. A solution would require our government to shift its priorities. And we would need a regulatory environment to encourage and force different practices, to devote resources to the issue. Programs would need to be more reliable, crucial functions would need to be isolated, and external audits would need to be commonplace. Some of the steps we could take on the financial side—such as targeting the ways in which people can launder money out of the crypto currencies they have acquired through such illicit activities—may be practically easy, but they raise a lot of thorny questions too. Would that mean finally looking at regulations for cryptocurrencies? That would bring up how they have become speculative tools as well, and that raises an issue that’s even more fundamental: how the global economy keeps producing asset bubbles and massive waves of speculation, like the one that led to the 2008 financial crisis. And that problem relates to the concentrated nature of global wealth chasing returns, and the lack of strong oversight for some of the implications of this chase. All of this is to say, just like with technical debt, duct-taping our way out of the immediate crisis does not address the fundamental problems.