Effects Of Virtual Currency On The World'S Economy 

Nowadays, people doesn’t use real money to do transaction or fulfil their needs so they are searching something efficient and more simple to replace real money. Therefore virtual currency was invented in 2008 and become more popular throughout the world and in 2016 when Bitcoin, one of the virtual currencies reached the highest price at USD 19,978,60 (Coin. my,2018) and become more popular not only among adults but also among teenagers. However, not everyone who uses virtual currency success to manage it. On the other hand, virtual currency not only affecting an individual person but also affecting the whole world and make the world think about change from real money to virtual currency but there are many considerations and also a lot of impact when transitioning from real money to virtual currency. Firstly, new market are starting to appear one by one and make the money movement more easy. Secondly, it is more easy to track the crimes and violation of law that occur in dark web. Thirdly, people make virtual currency an speculating investment.

Virtual currency is still new technology that need support from every people so they can get people’s trust. So some people start to think creative and invent new place or market to enlarge people’s investment. The most famous virtual currency market now are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, and Litecoin. These not only make a new market to invest but also invent a new technology to support the improvement of the world’s investation. So all countries start to accepting the technology and it was learned by all country to prove it was relevant. The new company start to appear to create a new market too and deploys the new innovation to solve the problems of payments and investation. For example, companies such as Abra and Align use the technology to facilitate cross-border payments and in 2014, the total of the money sent to families in developing countries reached $436 billion and it shows a significant evidence that this will have a good market opportunities (Paul Nelson,2016). Now Bitcoin and the other market have already gain people’s heart and the user of Bitcoin is more than 25 million user but it is still under consideration to be used for a long term.

Dark web is the section of the web that is not accessible through the search engine. People are given access to is the surface web which is not even half of the internet. Dark web can only be accessed through special software for example Tor Browser which allows anonymous searching of the internet. The dark web is connecting a large number of people, however, the head among these people are using it for illegal trades. In 2014, a study was conducted by the University of Portsmouth and it was discovered that the most searched content on the dark web was child pornography and was followed by drugs and guns. It was also found that people purchase information about others on this dark web. Apart from these, the dark web has also housed activities which relate to finance, arms, criminal activities, among others. It is very common to hear news about money laundering or related activities on the darknet.

These days, criminal used to looking for virtual currency that is hard to track by the law enforcement. Eventhough the number of criminal in digital currency is hard to described but Shone Anstey, co-founder Blockchain Intelligence Group, show that illegal transactions in bitcoin have fallen to about 20 percent last year because bitcoin was made with blockchain so public record of transaction is available online and user need to put down the public address so intelligence agencies can track and find the movement of money to addresses that hackers give and catch the criminals when they try to cash out with exchanges or banks. Jonathan Levin the co founder of Chainalysis noted that because of the new law enforcement it make lack of trust to dark web market where people usually uses virtual currency. On 20 July the U. S. Justice Department and Europol announced the closure of two of the largest dark web marketplaces, AlphaBay and Hansa, which listed tens of thousands of vendors selling illegal drugs, fake identification documents and other prohibited products (CNBC,2017). The Department of Justice found that AlphaBay market used virtual currency to do transaction such as bitcoin, etherium, and monero. Few days later US District Court find Alexander Vinnik as a suspect because of using AlphaBay for money laundry and related crime and now the web was seized by US authorities. Now virtual currency is better through law enforcement tracking criminlas and holding the exchanges more accountable.

People start to speculating the up and down of virtual currency so they make virtual currency as a speculative investment. So these people buy virtual currency in one price they think is cheap and then hoping the price increase so they can get big profit from their return. The objective is the same like investment in stocks or precious metals is to buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest price so the only way that the speculators can get profit as many as they can is to set the floor price or the lowest price (Michael Miller,2014) but now, virtual currency is the most riskiest invesment because of their new technology and not an established commodity, which can fluctuate without a specific reason. There is some reason why virtual currency is the most risky one, the first one is virtual currency especially bitcoin is very unstable and very unpredictable. Second is not a secure currency, there is no official institute that arrange the movement of virtual currency and also there is no one responsible to people’s investment except their self even there is many case that virtual currency changes was hacked and losing customers holdings moreover, if people only hold their virtual currency there is no guarantee that their holdings are safe and the legal status of virtual currency is still changing because the US government confirm that virtual currency is a investment place but the other government, for example China still attacking the virtual currency because they keep thinking that virtual currency can make the earnings decreased because of people invested their money to virtual currency and then lost it so the economical life of China affected and make the China’s currencies dropped. Virtual currency is a very high risk speculating investment because of the growth percentage is around 1000 percent and the chart of the price is the most vertical so the price can dropped at any time (Stephen Roach,2017). So the world should keep monitoring the investment activities of their citizen in order to stabilizing their currency and not disturbed by the speculation of virtual currency.

In conclusion, virtual currency have a positive impact and negative impact to economic sector but virtual currency still must be considered to replace real money because of each country have a different regulation and policy for economic sector so virtual currency must be able to adapt and change their technology that can violate the rules so that it can be used throughout the world. Virtual currency also must have some agency to take care of it and responsible of all problems that occur so people can easily use it without worry about the safety.