in order to avoid such tragic incidence, i heard of wandering elephants in china. i stopped for a break after tracking hundreds of kilometers. the elephants took a siesta during their march north. the forest fire brigade has been monitoring the elephant journey and says it's the 1st time they've been seen sleeping in a group. wildlife authorities can't understand why the elephants left their natural habitat last year. but their adventure has captured the curiosity of millions of people following their journey online. ah, headlines on al jazeera, a un court has rejected the appeal, a former bosnian serb commander right from a lie dad. she was sentenced to life in 2017 for genocide and war crimes, including the srp bernita massacre dog, the butcher balls. they are melodic was found guilty of killing more than a 1000 muslim men and boys. during the bosnian war in the 1900 ninety's steadfast

and has more from the hey the life sentence against homeland each has been upheld. the judges found that all the appeals from the defense that were filed off to defer it in 2017. have been rejected, it's still unclear. i have the verdict here right now it's just handed over to me. what happened to the other genocides clause that actually also the prosecutor wanted to be him, be convicted for, but for sure. now the life sentence has been piled up means that the boss in serbian commander, milady will have to spend the rest of his life in prison. the f b, i says it's developed a secret encrypted device to target criminal organizations worldwide. 800 people have been arrested in a global crime operation dubbed trojan shields. the worldwide implications of this investigation are staggering. in total,

the criminal sold more than 12000 and an encrypted devices and services to more than 300 criminal syndicates operating in over a 100 different countries. this was an unprecedented operation in terms of its massive scale, innovative strategy. international coordination and investigative achievement operation trojan shield has shattered any confidence criminals may have through the use of harden encrypted devices. canada's prime minister has called the killing of a muslim family, a terror attack motivated by hatred. the family was waiting at an intersection in the city of london in ontario when they were deliberately round to the pickup truck on sunday. the french president has been slapped in the face while visiting a small town in the south. local media reporting that 2 people have been arrested inside stories coming up next on alta 0. bye bye news.

news. news. news. news come big going be trusted. el salvador wants to make it legal tender, but other countries that clumping down on quick to currencies, saying they provide a haven for criminal. so what's the future? but digital money is inside story. ah . hello and welcome to the program on the hill robin. it's just over a decade, bitcoin has turned from an idea into one of the most talked about financial assets every day. will companies sign up to accept it as a form of payment?

funds say is the future of money free from the control of governments and central banks. the largest crypto currency conference in history took place last week in miami, and it was here that el salvador president announced plans to make his country the 1st to accept bitcoin as legal, tender, 70 percent of the population don't have access to a bank account. because he says his plan will help salvadorans abroad, particularly in the united states to send money back home in the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion, 20001000 the formal economy and in the medium and long term. we hope that this is ball decision can help us push humanity, alyssa, tiny bit into the right direction. while cellar embracing bitcoin is a different story. in china, the government has banned the crypto currency services in banks, and it's blocked accounts promoting digital money on the micro blogging site. waco, one of the reasons maybe the environment. china is home to 70 percent of the

machines that handle mine crypto currency transactions. it's estimated they use more energy per year than all of our engine. tina chinese state media has accused criminals of using virtual currencies to load the money and trade weapons and drugs . and in the us, the justice department announced it had recovered most of the bit coins paid as ransom after hackers shut down oil pipelines last month. the equivalent of full point $4000000.00 was sent to a group called dark fight, believe to be based in russia. today we turned the tables on dark side by going after the entire ecosystem that fuels ransomware and digital extortion attacks, including criminal proceeds in the form of digital currency. we will continue to use all of our tools and all of our resources to increase the cough and the consequences of ransomware attacks and other cyber enabled attacks.

ah, well, let's bring in august and stood on tv for apple, who's an assistant professor in economic law at utrecht university in london dollar . i'm a kind of why chair of cybersecurity and the department of computer science at the university of york and new york john big journalist, entrepreneur and full editor of coin desk, a site specializing in but coin and digital currency is welcome to all on the program. john can begin with you in new york because in theory, an opportunity for the disenfranchised to be included in a process that will make it easier for them to receive money from abroad without the middleman taking a huge cut on the surface. it seems like quite a game changer for el salvador. sure, absolutely. does. i mean the, the ultimate dream for a lot of big coin fans. crypto currency fans in general was the ability to do

remittances. remittance is the crypto currency are essentially free. they're still associated fees, but they're definitely not the $20.00 to $30.00 to even 50 percent fees associated with like a western union. those fees are just for pages. so for our salvador to, to accept bitcoin as its own currency, you could say, or just a sort of generally accepted in a as legal tender is vitally important. because i can basically sit here from my phone with you over $5.00 and not have to worry that i'm going to lose $250.00 of that $2.50 of that in transfer fees. that's a game changer for anybody who's making just a little bit of cash. why do you think he's proposing it now? why are they proposing? and now the, the answer to that is that it was, it was bit quite miami. there was, there was a conference going on and it's just now becoming more mainstream to actually be able to pull this off. and it's actually probably easier,

cheaper now than ever to pull this off so they might as well do it. now, let's go over to a t base ripple in amsterdam, i mean, while president and ne, but kelly as to how to decide which likely will be ratified by his government because he has the numbers over there in parliament. how much of a move do you think this is to counter sort of us allegations at the moment of corruption on this widening rift between the u. s. that wants to counter you might say any elicit financial dealings around the world to el salvador, trying to flex its muscle and on the surface help its own people. while in my opinion, the us is actually right in the middle. you do have one extreme which will be to, to adopt greater currencies as they exist already, which is the, the bus that to all of the doors taking right now. another extremely too bad crypto currencies, which are numerous countries including edges, morocco, bullied, and so on. are doing and then in the middle of the us and europe,

which are regulating existing crypto currencies. but also the same time they tried to create their own criminal currencies to put a digital euro or digital daughter. so it's not that extreme and that different from, from el salvador inform respects delara come by. can i bring you in from london? i, what's your opinion now? you've heard, you might say 2 views, one month to diamond from new york. well, i work mostly in the science of crypt according to them bitcoin. so my perspective is more towards the security and yet how this could be secure and how it can be legalized in many countries. for example, in u. s. and japan, i mean, come bitcoin, be the be security safe. you might say in a country like el salvador, we might not think of it as being a 1st world i'm. so that's a good question. i mean,

some of the beachfront companies, they have, they have their own security rates and it's really hard to know what they are, what they are using because of the i key or other regulations. but the point is that perhaps that's all they wanted to catch up and be in the same pages other 1st more countries. as mentioned, john was talking about the new york, i mean, come to us or put any pressure on el salvador. so to, to change their minds on using this bit coin currency because the move will allow pop cell solvable to move away from the normal banking systems. will it all in an potential sort of us oversight while the what, what we're, what we're talking about here is the, is the, i guess, the digital equivalent of putting the, filling a suitcase full of cash and sending it overboard. right. so it's a really,

really interesting question. the tracking is it, is it legal? does it have any effect on the economy? i guess you could say. and i would argue that in many cases, this is exactly, this is exactly what a poor country should be doing. currency controls or damaging to a lot of countries. a lot of the fear associated with crypt currency isn't really a big deal. you asked about security. again, as i said, if you stick or if you stick a bunch of cash in a box and send it to grandma and, and salvador, you're going to worry that somebody's gonna intercept that and open it up. but vast majority time, it's almost impossible with crypto currency. luckily, that also means that once grandma gets cash, she can be swindled out of it pretty easily because of because of online fraudsters, et cetera. the real question for salvador, how are they going to manage taxation of this? and one would suspect that at this point, they don't have a good handle on that. and in the future, if they're able to use crypto,

they may have a better handle on it, especially if they use some sort of centralized exchange by breaking crypto currencies. crypt occurrence is supposed to be implicitly decentralized, right? there's not gonna be supposed to be one actor by breaking them and making one actor in that country. you could feasibly, you could feasibly make, have more control over. okay? well, it's not again, agreement. i want to come to you actually over. did i mean, how much if we, why this conversation out now beyond del sol? how much had the arrival and performance of bitcoin made established banks of the banking system rethink the way that they have to operate now and in the future? because 10 years is a very short space of time to any change to face of the way. finances being re thought. i'm afraid we have to talk a bit about the technique and the infrastructure behind each crypto currency. because you asked the question about security to some degree you could say that's bitcoin is very secure because it is immutable. so if you send money, you know, for a fact that money has been sent to that person or the other. right. and if you want

to stop transactions, then you could say that bitcoin is probably not exactly what you want. and therefore, you may want to be looking for another type of crypto currency in which you do have only one actor behind it controlling all transactions. and i think this is what we're going to see when the state is going to develop their own crypto currencies. you will be public, meaning that everyone will be able to use it, but it will be permission, meaning that only the state or a handful of players will be able to track all transactions and potentially stop the few transactions. so at the end of the day, the infrastructure behind block shane and bitcoin and all of those critical currencies is very important. of course, i mean if you want to trust bitcoin as a currency, you have to buy into it as such. i mean, and that's what pops the problem lies to the skeptics, doesn't it? t boned that it's success is for those that sort of want to take a chance on it. and it's all about trust. yes, and i mean that's the big debate because when i had to come to whoever the person is wrote the basically paper you said that the coin was

a trust less technology and currency and some poor, arching. that's the thing that it's actually the exact opposite. it allows you because you don't have to trust a single person to trust the entire system, but i very much agree with you. it's all a matter of trust at the end of the day. but the same is true for the dollar and euro. i mean, you trust that people are book value, the value if you use it for payments. so it's not that different at the end of the day in that regard. if you want to give you a little bit more context, you talk about trust because an, as the best of the different types of crypto currency. so let's have a quick look at them because the quick to currencies, we've mentioned of virtual money that are exchanged on line crypto currencies drive the value from being gas and a saved in a digital wallet that i value has fluctuated over the years. and despite the supporter say that they are safe havens that could one day replace gold. then there is organizations like facebook that have packed theme, and it's another form of crypto currency is planning to launch a digital coin peg to the us dollar later this year. and then there are governments

who are looking at creating their own digital currencies. they're essentially electronic cash that could be used instead of bank notes, checks and credit cards. so let me go to a dollar and cut by in london. of course, it's all about trust and, and the legality of crypto currencies being a form of money. i want to give an example makes pretty for everybody at home that can paps think of a simple example trust and legal finance is when you buy a house, for example, i may want to purchase a house in the u. k. a when it comes to the bank, asking me where my buddy comes from, they have to do due diligence as does the lawyer who's organizing the paperwork around the house. they want to the, where the money has come from and how long it's been sitting in my bank before they can go ahead and said, yes, it's not part of money laundering or drug money. and that's where the problem license, if the big coin and in that security aspect delara is that a problem in the way people can use bitcoin and the security aspects around it.

that's a great question. one thing we have to pay attention is this going started on in 2008. and usually what we consider in cryptography is something secure. it's a lot of talk refers mathematicians have to really study age and do do lots of research. so it's going to take some time, but inevitably, i think digital currency are going to replace the classic currency as anything else . when we, many years ago when we moved from our paperwork to everything come to your eyes. so it's a certain about the verification and authentication. these are the topics in cryptography that has been worked for a long time and the security around point or not just

a trust and authentication. it's also how you can hack it or break it, which relies on security are so called hash functions, which is still the existence of the rio hash function. all can problem in the work. so the question about how did all the cheese 8? i think most of the governments are concerned about the eco way of using crypt currencies. for example, i don't know large or petrie shop or things like that. so it's something that event we'd up digital car which is still going on and it's possible it's just like they don't want to be surprised or they find other ways. and also what about taxation show as a t, but you're not in agreement. you wanna come in?

sure, because i realize this might be confusing to, to some listeners because we hear sometimes that everything that happens on the blocks is public. and sometimes we hear quite the opposite, that the dream for criminal to do something and secrets, and actually the 2 are true at the same time. so to make it clear what you see on the block chain that is for the b going block chain are, is the meta data. so you will see that one user is transacting with another user that is public. but the reason for the transaction, the real life identity is not necessarily shown on the block chain. and so for that reason, it might be if you can combine the data that the regulator or the enforcer gets to the real life identity and to stop transaction. but at the same time, if you don't have enough information, then indeed it might be that so be coin is more secrets than using your credit cards to, to buy something in a store. and these, all of at flags that are being flown at the moment. john in new york and recent events in china, certainly as the last weekend have certainly made people who have bitcoin alert,

especially because a lot of the actually the mining, the collection of bitcoin does happen in server areas across china. what's your reactions, what's going on there? i mean, i think it say, i think it's a ploy by the chinese government to reorganize the face of crypto currency. the, the bitcoin mines are hugely energy intensive, but the fact is they basically run them next to the next oil hydro electric plan. so you're essentially getting free energy to run these things, but it's making, it's making people who are essentially off the radar, fairly rich when it comes to that, when it comes to that technology. so that, that mission over there is to create a more earth friendly crypto currency that can be tracked in the same way they were just talking about. i think one of the other issues that we have in terms of crypt currency is that we're waiting for that the governments are essentially trying to

figure out a way to pave the pave the road towards general adoption. right now we, you, anyone on this call could probably grab some, probably bright grass or if there's some big coin just by doing the things you need to do on a computer. but the vast majority of people who would really, really need this technology wouldn't be able to do it. they might not have the technology, they might not have the understanding. they might not even have the trust. so if, if what i, i was, i was working on a remittance system a couple years ago. 2014, i suppose. and the whole idea of remittances is based around the you go to a place you to sign a little piece of paper and you give your money over to a clerk behind a bullet bulletproof class. and you feel comfortable that that process is safe and secure. that's why you use a western that's why you use the money transfer station. this whole process is completely wild. it's completely alien. and it's, and it's, and it seems on its surface implicitly dangerous. so that sort of education is vitally important now indeed, and della uncovering, you hear about, you know,

being implicitly dangerous. and also how difficult it is to track sometimes the transactions. what's happened in the us over the colonial pipeline. ransomware demands recently in the recovery of 4.4, half the half of the 4400000 paid in ran. some certainly raises those red flags of that. i mean, how difficult is it to you might say, track down those that are, you know, involved in criminal activity, what sort of expertise would the americans have pulled in to try and get some of this big coin back? well, if i can, i try can trace such a digital currency, then it wouldn't satisfy the actual meat or the creation. what do you mean to be answered? there are many research around. it's perhaps creating something you are adding additional parameters or something like that to the,

to the whole cryptography part to be, to, to make sure that it will be adjusted to what governments are concerned up or perhaps prevent some of the actions taken by or concerns about the criminal assets or it's in terms of the criminality tv. i mean the us seems to want to head off bitcoin mining is such and, and, and most of the examples of, of what's happened on their own territory. alarms them when they're actually trying to tighten the rules of the countries. sure, i mean, it seems to me that what you see very clearly is a race between some developers and the state. not all of them want to escape, you know, the state and some do and the state who are trying to catch up and to develop new technique. and so at the end of the day, it might be that if you are a big state, you may be able to track down some, some face, some use it. it might be more complex if you are an individual going after another

be user. so that's one thing that's happening in the field, and i very much agree that another very important topic is the one of access. and that's where big companies kick in. and we see, and we discussed already facebook. we're launch a crypto currency in just a few weeks a month and it seems from the white paper that the plan is that if you download facebook or instagram, what's up on your phone, then automatically you will get the wallet that will allow you to use their crypto currency. so of course the trade in lots of questions is especially anti trust questions. but those are the 2 topics that i think we should be discussing and probably together. indeed, and in terms of the way countries, john big new york like egypt, morocco and potentially india banning crypto currencies. do you think that is something that's just going to stay? you might say for the short term, because in the long term they're going to have to, you might say, you know, joined the party. yeah. it's, it's a short term. it's a short term solution. it's

a, it's a solution born of you can say frustration with the technology moving so fast, not be not understanding a technology is often that is often the fastest road to banning it, unfortunately, or understanding it too well, right. understanding the understand the implications, especially for currency controls and especially in a country where we're, maybe the outflow is bigger than the inflow. for example, trying to control that, those economics is widely different, difficult. it's in a lot of companies, countries have given up, which is why you see a slow but steady acceptance of crypto currency, outright bands, they never work, right? they're never, they're not going to, they're not going to remain. and i'm 100 percent certain that if, if we went to morocco right now, would be able to find some big point somewhere. in fact, i could carry this thing with me, which is a, this is crazy, a wallet. i could carry this in a morocco and buy and sell coin pretty easily. indeed, i mean, in general,

i just bring you in there to talk about security because that is being called into question. and in the briefing that's i got before this program, you talk of quantum computers coming into effect and then having a very big influence on the whole business itself. yes. so in 2015 but national security just in the us after smoke. and revelation made an announcement followed by a nice national institute of standard and technology made a made a worldwide announcement or getting proposals for so called post quantum primitives or pizza systems that are basically secure against the strong quantum computer will be, will be invented. and last july,

the 3rd round happened and the and off the final is of the of the competition that are included in laughter, space, cryptography, and code based cryptography, cryptography. and so each coins or crypt cars are somehow should be you know, i kept mentioning about more research has to be done. and so to, to attract the trust of the government. because if people that you know, the word is going up, i just need one very brief question. then to tv shows amsterdam, what do you say to the skeptics like warren buffet, isla muscular mosque was singing the praises of bitcoin just a few years ago. now he's pulling back a little bit sure and then it has been also vocal. busy in thing that, you know, maybe it's not too bad after all, and you may have some financial interest behind you too. it's very hard to,

to read what's happening. but if you move a little bit and you look at the state level, what you see that there is a tension between trying to keep control and also trying to get lots of users and people involving a system which also provide security. and so that tension is being express by the european central bank. they have been quite vocal that they are looking for the best way to design you to euro. but i just want to make it clear that the end game of all that is not just to, to give a crypto currency, but it's to own the infrastructure for to morrow world's transaction. and if a states manages that is a critical currency will be adopted by all the states. it might be the most important economy power ever old by any governments, because they will control any transactions happening everywhere. we shall see. what does happen though they we have to have it, i'm afraid to be wrapping up on the la. i'm a cutter by in london, and john bigs in new york. thank you so much for joining us on this edition of inside story. and thank you for watching as well. you can see all the while previous programs anytime by visiting our website at amazon dot com and for further

discussion gateway facebook page at facebook dot com forward slash ha inside story . also join the conversation on twitter handle. there is a inside story from the inside story thing. i mean the whole rahman, thanks very much for your time and your company. ah. news news. news. news close to host world leaders at a u. k. coastal town for the 2021 g 7. summit corona, virus, vaccines and carbon emissions will be high on the agenda, but with russia and china out of the loop, how much progress can be made in tackling the global issues of our time. the g 7

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