“This ability to financially disrupt, disable and dismantle nefarious networks, is crucial to U.S. national security, Treasury officials say. It has proven effective for more than a decade and is often strongly preferable to deploying troops. ‘We have made it very difficult for members of the Islamic State to raise or move money around the world these days,’ Zarate says. ‘Even Iran had a hard time finding safe havens.’ In fact, years of financial pressure from the U.S. and its allies helped force Iran to negotiate with the White House and sign a landmark nuclear deal last year.The biggest concern the U.S. has about virtual currencies, Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they’ll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America’s defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.”
Source: Bitcoin Is Being Monitored by an Increasingly Wary U.S. Government
