It’s a natural thing for us to demand complete control of every situation. While we understand the need for governance, we don’t necessarily like it. After all, governance can sometimes result in choices that are not entirely in our favor. Nevertheless, despite our internal dissent, we have had no option but to play by the rules. It could have been simple like this, but then we were bestowed with technology and everything just got trickier than we had ever imagined. As we know, the whole concept of technology is based around encouraging a wider stance, thus when it found its way into our lives, every wall known to us was essentially broken. We can’t deny that the benefits of it were more than immense, but at the same time, the adjustment made something as important as governance a tougher task. The number of loopholes that appeared out of nowhere happened to be too many, and it doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to realize how adversely it affected the governing bodies across the board. To make matters worse, before authorities could catch up, the world had moved on to a more advanced version of technology, leaving regulations and general management in tatters. However, a string of closed cases now offer a ray of hope that the regulatory world badly needed. One of these cases deals with the infamous bitcoin ‘mixer’.
Larry Dean Harmon, the owner of bitcoin mixer, Helix, recently pleaded guilty for laundering over $300 million in the form of bitcoins. Helix’s model was by and large about charging the customer a certain fee for sending cryptocurrencies to a given address, but that’s not all what it was about. The most intriguing element of its operations was the anonymity that the mixer offered to its customers. We often see cryptocurrency owners seeking to avoid using their names in an attempt to sneak past the regulatory eye, so for them, Helix was pretty much the definition of a perfect match.
While entering his plea, Harmon confessed to have conspired with numerous Darknet marketplaces like AlphaBay, Evolution, Cloud 9, and more, to set-up an effective money laundering system. He even admitted to be in the knowing of the fact that AlphaBay and Evolution were popular for selling illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services. Harmon, who is currently out on bail, will have to give up a collection of over 4.400 bitcoins, and even though it’s not set in stone at the moment, he could very well face a 20 years long imprisonment period. With his confession, Helix mixer case becomes one of the first cryptocurrency-related cases to result in conviction.