SomaliCoin Solution to send funds to terrorist groups in the region
Mobile money agents in Kenya have become cautious as the police investigate a link between use of the service and terror activities in the East African nation.
SomaliCoin a Security Token was working for the past 7 years in building its infrastructure to solve money laundering to terror groups and criminal actors in the Somali region.
Ongoing investigations into the recent terror attack in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, where 21 people were killed and several others injured by terrorists allied to Somali group al-Shabab, have placed mobile money at the heart of the terror financing.
In 2009, an anonymous software engineer using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency. In the years since, the market for Bitcoin and some 1,300 other cryptocurrencies has swollen to $500 billion; they are used in hundreds of thousands of transactions daily to buy everything from software to real estate to illegal drugs.
So called for their use of cryptography principles to imbue virtual coins with value, cryptocurrencies present unique challenges for governments. For others, including terrorist organizations, sanctioned states, and transnational criminal groups, these technologies represent a source of opportunity.
Most cryptocurrencies are exchanged on decentralized networks [PDF] between peers who control virtual wallets secured with public key encryption. All transactions of most cryptocurrencies are recorded publicly on a universal and immutable distributed ledger known as the blockchain.
Cryptocurrency users send funds between wallet addresses on the blockchain. Imagine two users, Alice and Bob. If Alice wants to send one Bitcoin to Bob, she first needs to know the address of Bob’s Bitcoin wallet. Alice then uses her private key to securely sign a transaction containing Bob’s wallet address and the amount to be transferred. Alice then sends the signed transaction to the Bitcoin network, where it is confirmed across the blockchain by “miners” and recorded into a transaction “block.” Once this occurs, the transaction is complete: one Bitcoin is debited from Alice’s wallet and added to Bob’s. The Bitcoin network retains a record of this transfer on the blockchain forever.
Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two most popular cryptocurrencies, offer something close to pseudo-anonymity. The blockchain does not record real names or physical addresses, but if the owner of a wallet becomes known, their transactions, which are public, can be traced back to them.
Other cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, offer anonymity-enhancing features that make them especially appealing for individuals and entities looking to avoid government scrutiny. Researchers have found [PDF], however, that even Monero does not offer watertight anonymity.
Cryptocurrencies vary in how they manage supply, but many of the popular ones, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, are “mined” up to a fixed total supply. For example, only twenty-one million Bitcoins can ever be mined; nearly seventeen million have been so far.
Mining is the process of computers solving specific cryptographic problems to confirm transactions on the blockchain. Miners are rewarded with coins for solving these problems before others.
Source: Geeska Afrika
