First of all, it should be noted that crypto-currencies, although they are born from a consensus of use and are an indirect means of exchange, are not considered to be legal tender. Since each country or group of countries reserves the exclusive right to issue its own currency and subject to it the compulsory payment of taxes on said currency. In doing so, they ensure that wages are only paid with currency issued by the central bank and this allows them to control capital flows.
Due to the emergence of cryptocurrencies, two types of users have emerged. On the one hand, the people who generate this capital to sell it, on the other hand, the people who acquire it. In the latter case, large amounts of legal capital flow into cryptocurrencies and not only the entire tax system suffers, but the entire economy in general. In addition, anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions gives wings to illicit transactions in theory. This is why Europe is seeking to end cryptocurrencies by eliminating the anonymity of transactions.
Europe in the hunt for crypto-currencies, the measures they intend to adopt
A few days ago, the European Union proposed a new bill, which would apply to all member countries and which aims to ban anonymous digital wallets and transfers of funds therefrom. On the grounds of protecting EU citizens and the financial system.
The bill is based on four different points:
- Create a new EU agency against money laundering and terrorist financing.
- Implement new rules that affect the relationships between the two parties in transactions.
- Update European Union Directive 2015/849, to cover national surveillance by members established
- New rules for financial intelligence institutions and units and amendments to the “Regulation on the control of the transfer of crypto funds” of 2015.
The idea behind these measures is to end the anonymity of transfers, which will give member countries an inventory of capital movements to and from digital wallets. So if these laws are approved, the same rules as traditional bank transfers will apply to them. This includes information such as sender’s name, sender’s account number, sender’s address, personal identification number, customer identification or date and place of birth. , the name of the beneficiary and the personal account number of the beneficiary and the place where the account is registered.
How does this affect the material?
Today, every PC’s hardware has a series of backdoors that security agencies can access, the most famous of which are the Intel Management Engine and the AMD Platform Security Processor. This gives Intel and AMD remote access to your PC, taking advantage of the fact that they acquire the highest level of privilege possible. And when we talk about access, we mean full remote control.
With the arrival of Windows 11 and the need to place a TPM chip to be able to operate it and which stores the keys and user data. In the future, with regard to the administrations of each country, our computers with our data will be exposed to the public administrations regardless of the political color of the country concerned. In this way, the different administrations can remotely monitor the use of each computer without the users’ knowledge.
In addition, operating systems can have an activity monitor that shows the processes and applications running on the PC at all times. Hence the use of mining software can be induced. Thus, with a series of measures, Europe will be able to deduce that it uses cryptocurrencies, either as a miner or to trade with them.
If that sounds dystopian to you, I’m just going to drop one thing. Each of the CPUs that have been produced has a unique identifier which is its serial code, which can be queried with a simple instruction. Every installation of Windows, even a pirated copy, has a code that is generated and sent to Microsoft who knows if your copy is pirated or not. If we add to this what we commented in the first paragraph about the TPM backing up sensitive data, it is very clear that if these solutions are approved, our PCs will be even more monitored in their use.
And what about graphics cards?
Graphics cards are the hardware used to mine a good chunk of cryptocurrency, although as the complexity of the algorithm increases, they are gradually being phased out. Every cryptocurrency begins with being able to decode with a fraction of a processor core to be passed to the GPU and later to mining ASICs. The development goes hand in hand with the reduction in the energy cost per operation performed by said processor.
When a cryptocurrency reaches its peak of popularity, it is when its mining through a graphics card starts to become popular. The demand for graphics equipment is increasing and huge capital is going to buy this equipment to set up mining farms where these graphics are running all the time. For now, companies like NVIDIA have limited the mining of certain cryptocurrencies in their RTX 30, but it’s a cat-and-mouse game and similarly hackers are continually finding new security holes. , the same goes with the creation of dozens of cryptocurrencies. , where not all succeed.
The only way to limit the use of GPUs for cryptocurrency mining is to block certain apps remotely, we explained how to do this in the previous section. Through monitoring user applications and subsequent remote blocking, as well as opposing the use of the hardware or all of its resources.
