What Happens When Anonymous Gets a Bank?

[Magda Hassan]

They don't really like the competition do they.

[Magda Hassan]

Is Bitcoin Bringing The "Dark Web" Into The Light?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/16/2013 18:36 -0500

Despite the best efforts of the search engines, the majority of the Internet is unsearchable with estimates of this "Unlit" Web as high as 90%. As ConvergEx's Nick Colas notes, some of this content (no one knows how much) is dark for a reason - hosting every form of criminal behavior known to man - but the rest from the increasing interest in anonymous Internet use in light of widely publicized government surveillance.
Among the least well understood emerging themes in technology, Colas points out, is the "Dark Web", adding that Oscar Wilde famously opined that "All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret." The existing structure of the Internet handles the first two very well. The Dark Web is, apparently, for the third. The first innovation to move from "Dark" to "Lit" Web is bitcoin, but it certainly won't be the last.
Via ConvergEx's Nick Colas,
If you are a fan of the movie The Princess Bride, you might recall the character of Dread Pirate Roberts. His was as inherited position, with one man handing down the job to a worthy apprentice when he grew tired of the pirating game. This approach allowed a series of people to benefit from the efforts of many predecessors rather than having to build up their own "Brand" on the high seas.
I am sorry to report that the name Dread Pirate Roberts is now not just a memory from a delightful book and movie, but the nom du guerre of a man accused of running a real life drug website and attempting to arrange several contract killings. His real name is Ross Ulbricht, and these are the particulars of his case:

According to Federal prosecutors, the FBI arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library on October 1st. They confiscated his laptop computer, where they noted he was logged into a website call Silk Road as an administrator. This was a popular site for the sale and distribution of illegal drugs and other contraband. The FBI had successfully tracked the operation of the site to Ulbricht, according to court documents related to the case.

In documents found on the seized computer, investigators found a journal, which they claim chronicles Ulbricht's own development of the site back to its founding in 2010. This included the odd fact that he had grown several kilos of hallucinogenic mushrooms so the site would have something to sell when it went live but before other sellers began to offer their own illegal drugs.

As if running an online portal for illicit drugs wasn't bad enough, Ulbricht also allegedly tried to arrange six murders-for-hire. The reported targets, all of who are still apparently alive, ranged from blackmailers to fraudulent sellers on the site. These presumably eroded Silk Road's reputation and user trust.

As of this writing, Ulbricht is being held without bail. The Federal government confiscated 144,000 bitcoins as part of the investigation, worth $122 million as of today. Several press accounts of the case theorize that this stash was only part of Ulbricht's total holdings and that, if true, would give him access to hundreds of millions of dollars in notional wealth with which to flee the country.

The bitcoin piece of this story got some press, given all the recent interest in the online "Currency"; what got lost in the wash was the presence of the "Dark Web" a parallel, if much larger Internet, to the one we all use every day. A brief description here:

Google, Yahoo and Bing, among other search engines, only track part of the Internet essentially the bits that website owners want the public to see. Business owners strive to optimize their sites to appear on pages 1 or 2 of a given search, knowing that most users will not travel farther. Time magazine recently ran a cover article on the "Deep Web", essentially the Internet which search engines do not reach, and estimated that +90% of online content cannot be found by the typical search engines we all use every day. Wired magazine puts the number at 99%. Either way, most of the Internet is essentially "Dark".

A large chunk of this "Missing" data must come from its formatting, unfriendly to Google/Yahoo/Bing search algorithms. Just consider all the economic data available through the Federal Reserve's datasets. Typing "FRED inflation" into Google does get you to the St. Louis Fed's excellent database of economic indicators, but from there you have to enter exactly what you want. Google, among others, is busy trying to integrate this information; there is a link after the text to a paper describing this effort. Another example of the Dark Web: your financial information at your bank or broker, held behind security firewalls but available to you with an ID and password.

Then there is the part of the Internet that doesn't want to be found, and where the "Dark Web" means something else. Silk Road is one example, and even though that site is now shuttered there are other places on the Dark Web where users can purchase illegal drugs. From there, it gets a lot worse. There are sites advertising contract killings, illegal pornography, money laundering, and stolen financial information. Some press reports link global terrorism to the Dark Web.

Now, you won't find the Dark Web on your Explorer, Safari or Firefox browser. To find these sites you'll need something called Tor, short for "The Onion Router", or other software which essentially makes you anonymous online. These browsers route your heavily encrypted traffic through a rabbit warren of servers around the world, making it nearly impossible to connect your computer to any individual site you might visit. Tor was actually developed by the U.S. Navy for secure communication, but the software is available for free here: https://www.torproject.org
Secure and anonymous access to the Internet is becoming a growth business, and Tor is one of the hottest tickets to that show. The Google search phrase "Tor search" has tripled in the last year, and the query "Tor" is up 100% over the same period. Like most fashion-forward tech trends, searches for Tor cluster on the coasts, in Oregon, Washington state, California and New York. Since search engine capability doesn't reach the Dark Web by design, of course TorSearch is now available for users, with a reported 130,000 sites listed and something like a tripling of use in the last few weeks, according to media accounts.
There is an obvious tension between a growth opportunity for business and the need for society to regulate and control the illegal use of any technology. A few points here:

Aside from search engine companies, there is not much academic research dedicated to the Dark Web. We spent the better part of day trolling the usual scholarly sites, with little success.

Law enforcement seems poorly equipped to handle the challenge. There was one high profile takedown of a server hosting a range of illegal activities in Ireland over the summer (link below), but its success seems to have been caused by a flaw in the Firefox browser software used by Tor. The flaw has since been fixed. It wasn't a technical gltich that brought down Silk Road one of the supposed hitmen contracted for the murder-for-hire plot was an undercover agent.

We did find one consumer product offering related to Tor something called pogoplug which directs your web traffic into the anonymous network. It cost $49 and has wifi for your cell phone. The downside: Tor is slower than conventional access since your information transits through more connections than the customary point-to-point process.

All that said, we do have one innovation bitcoin that successfully made the transition from Dark to "Lit" web. Silk Road was clearly an early enabler of the online "Currency" but it now has the tacit recognition of everyone from the Federal Reserve to business television. Like the Dark Web, its early appeal was anonymity, but its low cost utility for money transfer should allow it to survive increasing regulatory scrutiny. It won't be a flawless transition, considering its birth in the primordial ooze of the Dark Web, but it seems well on its way.
Can there be other innovations, developed in the shadows of the Dark Web, which hit the mainstream? It seems inevitable. Revelations of government spying around the world provide the notional demand for anonymous Internet use. Oscar Wilde famously opined that "All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret." The existing structure of the Internet handles the first two very well. The Dark Web is, apparently, for the third.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-16...-web-light

[Magda Hassan]

Probably not using encryption
http://cryptome.org/2013/12/silk-road-indictments.pdf

Silk Road 2.0 busted, two administrators, Inigo and Libertas arrested in US and Ireland in an international swoop,

---

By Vijay Prabhu on 23:18

---

The heir of original Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0 which had announced its launch in November, 2013 has been plucked in the bud. Though the reports are sketchy and could not be verified with authorities but it seems that authorities from US and other countries came together in an international operation to clamp down on the dark web black market once for all. The news which has been confirmed by TechCrunch says that two moderators of the the newly named Silk Road 2.0 have been arrested. One of the arrest was made in the United States and the other was arrested in Ireland.

As per news reports, a man named Andrew Michael Jones who uses the name Inigo on Silk Road, was arrested in Virginia while the second one who goes by the alias of Libertas, was arrested in Wicklow, Ireland. The source said that

"They caught [Libertas] this evening at his house in Wicklow at around 8pm Irish time, and managed to seize approx 200,000 Euro of bitcoins in the raid,The figure is to be confirmed It looks like the the beginnings of the demise of Silk Road 2, not very long after its resurrection."

Though the rumors were confirmed only in the evening but in the morning a Redditor named PrincessBtcButtercup divulged that here boyfriend a Silk Road administrator has been arrested on Reddit's r/SilkRoad Forum

SR admin and mod just got arrested....my boyfriend.... (self.SilkRoad)

submitted 11 hours ago by [deleted]

I'm not sure what his login name was, all i know is that apparently he was an admin and then a mod and that he also ran the book club. He is a wonderful person and has been supporting me (due to my chronic pain), so to say the least my world has been turned inside out and upside down. They told me they were making arrests all around the world at the same time....can anyone give me any info on who he was? i'm hoping he was well liked and respected because even though i didn't know he was doing this, I can guarantee he was doing it out of his passion for Libertarianism and for the idea of a free marketplace. Just thought i would pass on the message.....

138 commentssharesavehidereport

She then put up a reply whether her post on reddit would jeopardize her boyfriend or anybody else

[]PrincessBtcButtercup 1 point 8 hours ago
how so? that was in response to the comment made by the mod that got arrested yesterday saying his lawyer told him not to post online...and i meant bitched at by my boyfriend...i don't think i'm putting anyone else in possible jeopardy am i?

There was another confirmation thread on Reddit but was deleted within seconds of posting. The thread is given below

Guys I was arrested yesterday and out on bond now. But something is fucked! I know I'm risking more warning you guys and my attorney doesn't even want me on the internet but you guys need to know this. When I was in the interview room they showed me all sorts of shit that they should not know or have access to including conversations I've had with buyers and even DPR. I don't fucking understand.. and when I was in there I was at a loss for words. Something is definitely wrong and they have the ability to see things on here only mods or admins should like btc transfers and a dispute I had. WHAT THE FUCK?

The Search Warrant which were posted by the girl friend are given below :

Though the authorities may hope that with these arrests the Silk Road 2.0 may come to a grinding halt, but given the nature of internet and the global demand of drugs we may soon get to hear some more news about Silk Road 3.0

http://www.techworm.in/2013/12/two-silk-...inigo.html

[Magda Hassan]

Dimon just jealous because he wants to control the action. And he must be delusional if he thinks 'real' money has never been used for illicit stuff. And we know is isn't and we know his banks have been complicit in it too. Ninety seven percent of money these days is no more than zeros and ones on a computer and indistinguishable from bit coin currency in that it doesn't 'exist' either and is totally abstract. Just that the banks can't control that one.

The head of the largest bank in the US said Thursday that bitcoin is a "terrible store of value," in part because international governments, bankers, and other officials are unsure whether they can trust the digital currency.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase - which has $2.509 trillion in total assets - told CNBC that the cryptocurrency does not have much staying power because the hurdles it faces are insurmountable.
"It's a terrible store of value. It could be replicated over and over," he said. "It doesn't have the standing of a government."
Bitcoin proponents say that the currency's ability to exist without any centralization is what makes it so appealing. It is a peer-to-peer payment system that is formulated when computers compete with each other to "mine," or solve cryptographic problems, and are assigned bitcoins as a reward.
The use of bitcoin became so prevalent in 2013 that its value surged from $13 to over $1,000 by the end of the year, when it was the subject of Senate hearings that were largely neutral and at times positive towards the digital currency.
Dimon went on to cite media coverage that reported on the use of bitcoin for nefarious purposes - drugs and the solicitation of murder among them.
"And honestly, a lot of it what I've read from you guys a lot of it is being used for illicit purposes. And people who will get upset with it is governments," Dimon said. "Governments put a huge amount of pressure on banks: know who your client is, did you do real reviews of that. Obviously it's almost impossible to do with something like that."
Despite any flaws bitcoin may have, the digital currency has proven to be an especially popular system worth investigating, and has spawned a growing list of parallel online currencies, including Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Coinye. Chase seems to agree, as the bank filed a patent application back in 2000 claiming a "computer-implemented method of providing an anonymous payment."
US Treasury secretary Jack Lew, also speaking to CNBC, said that he has spoken to leaders in the financial industry and has decided that the current course of action will consist mostly of a wait-and-see strategy.
"Bitcoin is a phenomenon that we need more time to discuss," Lew said Thursday. "From the government's perspective, we have to make sure it does not become an avenue to funding illegal activity or to funding activities that have malign purposes like terrorist activities. You know, it is an anonymous form of transaction, and it offers places for people to hide."
Dimon speculated that bitcoin will soon become popular enough that the government will intervene, which could spell out the cryptocurrency's demise.
"They will eventually be made as a payment system to follow the same standards as the other payment systems and that will probably be the end of them," he said.

http://rt.com/usa/chase-ceo-bitcoin-terr...nfall-100/

[Lauren Johnson]

How Bitcoin Plays Into The Hands of Central Bankers

by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism

Bitcoin enthusiasts like to present it as a "power to the people" form of money, stressing its apparent lack of ownership (the "Napster for finance"). They stress the lack of need for a "trusted party" like a bank or broker to verify that a payment has been made. And many clearly relish the idea of launching a currency outside the control of central banks (plus this beats Cryptonomicon in geekery).

If you believe the hype, you've been had. As Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times tells us, you all are really just doing free/underpaid R&D for central banks, since you are debugging and building legitimacy for one of their fond projects, making currencies digital and getting rid of cash altogether....

As Kaminska explains (boldface mine):

Central bankers, after all, have had an explicit interest in introducing e-money from the moment the global financial crisis began…
Bitcoin has helped to de-stigmatise the concept of a cashless society by generating the perception that digital cash can be as private and anonymous as good old fashioned banknotes. It's also provided a useful test-run of a digital system that can now be adopted universally by almost any pre-existing value system.

This is important because, in the current economic climate, the introduction of a cashless society empowers central banks greatly. A cashless society, after all, not only makes things like negative interest rates possible, it transfers absolute control of the money supply to the central bank, mostly by turning it into a universal banker that competes directly with private banks for public deposits. All digital deposits become base money.

Consequently, anyone who believes Bitcoin is a threat to fiat currency misunderstands the economic context. Above all, they fail to understand that had central banks had the means to deploy e-money earlier on, the crisis could have been much more successfully dealt with.

Among the key factors that prevented them from doing so were very probable public hostility to any attempt to ban outright cash, the difficulty of implementing and explaining such a transition to the public, the inability to test-run the system before it was deployed.

Last and not least, they would have been concerned about displacing conventional banks from their traditional deposit-taking role, and in so doing inadvertently worsening the liquidity crisis and financial panic before improving it…

Almost of all of these prohibitive factors have, however, by now been overcome:

1) Digital currency now follows in the footsteps of a "disruptive" anti-establishment digital movement perceived to be highly accommodating to the black market and all those who would ordinarily have feared an outright cash ban. This makes it exponentially easier to roll out. Bitcoin has done the bulk of the educating.

2) What was once viewed as a potentially oppressive government conspiracy to rid the public of its privacy can be communicated as being progressive and innovative as a result.

3) Banks have been given more than five years to prove their economic worth and have failed to do so. If they haven't done so by now, they probably never will, meaning there's unlikely to be a huge economic penalty associated with undermining them on the deposit front or in transforming them slowly into fully-funded fund managers.

4) The open-ledger system which solves the digital double-spending problem has been robustly tested. Flaws, weaknesses and bugs have been understood, accounted for, and resolved.

The balance of the article describes how the central bank digital currency would be launched, and Kazmina finds a plan developed by Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan to be thorough and viable.

Oh, and why would Bitcoin, um, central bank digital currency make it viable to implement negative interest rates? Kaminska tells us:

…the greater the negative interest rate, the greater the incentive to hold alternative coins. The greater the incentive to hold alternative coins ,the greater the incentive to produce them. The greater the incentive to produce them, the greater the chances of oversupply and collapse. The more sizeable the collapse, the more desirable the managed official e-money system ultimately becomes in comparison.

Either way, the key point with official e-money is that the hoarding incentives which would be generated by a negative interest rate policy can in this way be directed to private asset markets (which are not state guaranteed, and thus not safe for investors) rather than to state-guaranteed banknotes, which are guaranteed and preferable to anything negative yielding or risky (in a way that undermines the stimulative effects of negative interest rate policy).

So all these tales by Silicon Valley promoters (and remember, Marc Andressen mentioned all the money chasing Bitcoin-related ventures) of how liberating and democratic Bitcoin will be are almost certain to prove to be precisely the reverse. Hang onto your real world wallet.

In a supposed future Bitcoin world, would it be harder or easier to launder drug money?

[David Guyatt]

How Bitcoin Plays Into The Hands of Central Bankersby Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism

Bitcoin enthusiasts like to present it as a "power to the people" form of money, stressing its apparent lack of ownership (the "Napster for finance"). They stress the lack of need for a "trusted party" like a bank or broker to verify that a payment has been made. And many clearly relish the idea of launching a currency outside the control of central banks (plus this beats Cryptonomicon in geekery). If you believe the hype, you've been had. As Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times tells us, you all are really just doing free/underpaid R&D for central banks, since you are debugging and building legitimacy for one of their fond projects, making currencies digital and getting rid of cash altogether....As Kaminska explains (boldface mine):

Central bankers, after all, have had an explicit interest in introducing e-money from the moment the global financial crisis began… Bitcoin has helped to de-stigmatise the concept of a cashless society by generating the perception that digital cash can be as private and anonymous as good old fashioned banknotes. It's also provided a useful test-run of a digital system that can now be adopted universally by almost any pre-existing value system. This is important because, in the current economic climate, the introduction of a cashless society empowers central banks greatly. A cashless society, after all, not only makes things like negative interest rates possible, it transfers absolute control of the money supply to the central bank, mostly by turning it into a universal banker that competes directly with private banks for public deposits. All digital deposits become base money. Consequently, anyone who believes Bitcoin is a threat to fiat currency misunderstands the economic context. Above all, they fail to understand that had central banks had the means to deploy e-money earlier on, the crisis could have been much more successfully dealt with. Among the key factors that prevented them from doing so were very probable public hostility to any attempt to ban outright cash, the difficulty of implementing and explaining such a transition to the public, the inability to test-run the system before it was deployed. Last and not least, they would have been concerned about displacing conventional banks from their traditional deposit-taking role, and in so doing inadvertently worsening the liquidity crisis and financial panic before improving it… Almost of all of these prohibitive factors have, however, by now been overcome: 1) Digital currency now follows in the footsteps of a "disruptive" anti-establishment digital movement perceived to be highly accommodating to the black market and all those who would ordinarily have feared an outright cash ban. This makes it exponentially easier to roll out. Bitcoin has done the bulk of the educating. 2) What was once viewed as a potentially oppressive government conspiracy to rid the public of its privacy can be communicated as being progressive and innovative as a result. 3) Banks have been given more than five years to prove their economic worth and have failed to do so. If they haven't done so by now, they probably never will, meaning there's unlikely to be a huge economic penalty associated with undermining them on the deposit front or in transforming them slowly into fully-funded fund managers. 4) The open-ledger system which solves the digital double-spending problem has been robustly tested. Flaws, weaknesses and bugs have been understood, accounted for, and resolved.

The balance of the article describes how the central bank digital currency would be launched, and Kazmina finds a plan developed by Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan to be thorough and viable. Oh, and why would Bitcoin, um, central bank digital currency make it viable to implement negative interest rates? Kaminska tells us:

…the greater the negative interest rate, the greater the incentive to hold alternative coins. The greater the incentive to hold alternative coins ,the greater the incentive to produce them. The greater the incentive to produce them, the greater the chances of oversupply and collapse. The more sizeable the collapse, the more desirable the managed official e-money system ultimately becomes in comparison. Either way, the key point with official e-money is that the hoarding incentives which would be generated by a negative interest rate policy can in this way be directed to private asset markets (which are not state guaranteed, and thus not safe for investors) rather than to state-guaranteed banknotes, which are guaranteed and preferable to anything negative yielding or risky (in a way that undermines the stimulative effects of negative interest rate policy).

So all these tales by Silicon Valley promoters (and remember, Marc Andressen mentioned all the money chasing Bitcoin-related ventures) of how liberating and democratic Bitcoin will be are almost certain to prove to be precisely the reverse. Hang onto your real world wallet.

In a supposed future Bitcoin world, would it be harder or easier to launder drug money?

A really interesting article I thought. The desire for global-wide digital money is a fairly old project. I detest the idea, even more than the paper crap we have now. But let's be straight here, most of us shop on the internet and use debit/credit cards widely already. If you need to pay your utility bills, most of them insist on payment by direct debit - or else charge you a premium for other forms of payment (even when it, too, is "legal tender" - a fooking cheek if ever there was one). These are all forms of digital money.

Will it be easier to launder drug money? My guess is that it will be a lot easier. A cinch, in fact. Hookers already carry wi-fi card machines for instant digital payment, and it's billed on your credit/debit card as some sort of 'service" or similar, that won't alert your wife/partner to your perfidy. And so the day will soon arrive - if it hasn't already? - for your coke purchase to be settled that way too. And then it's in the system directly from the get go, pre-laundered, and rolled straight into an programmed investment plan within a mille second.

Blink of an eye, sir? That will do nicely.

[Peter Lemkin]

Hmmm......very interesting and sinister article....

Unrelated in a related sort of way...the Czech Republic is shortly to be putting 'bitcoin' ATM machines [seems like an oxymoron, no?] all over Prague.

[Magda Hassan]

Not that long ago we told you about a new cryptocurrency called Ethereum that was just about to launch. Now that day is almost here. Ethereum was originally scheduled to launch Jan. 24, but it's been pushed back to February 1st.
There are many digital currencies out there now and we wanted to dig a little deeper into why Ether (the name of the currency) is so special. We got some face time with the creator, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin.
Q: So, what's your background?
"I first got started with Bitcoin in March 2011. I found a guy setting up a Bitcoin blog and he was giving 5 Bitcoins for an article. Back then it was 3.75 Bitcoins so I took that and earned 20 bitcoins and over next few months. I was in high school in Toronto at the time, and studied everything from science to math and Latin. Around May 2013 I made the decision to basically take a break from university and go and work on bitcoin stuff full time."
Q. So what makes Ethereum different from Bitcoin?
"What I eventually realized was that Bitcoin is a great protocol for moving money around but is really not a good protocol for building stuff on top of. The logical conclusion is what if you could make one protocol that does a lot of things as abstract as possible. The idea of Ethereum is that there's this abstract idea called a contract and a contract could be anything."
Q. So tell us more about what you can use Ethereum for?
"Ethereum takes this completely different track, instead of saying these are the things you can do and making features for them, Ethereum has a programming language. When you have a programming language you can code whatever features you want. So Ethereum is like JavaScript, it's what lets you make not just decentralized currency, but decentralized applications so you can do anything you want."
Q.You said earlier that Ethereum is the Lego of cryptocurrency?
"So the idea of Lego is that Lego doesn't constrain you, it doesn't tell you these are the things you can build, it lets you choose from your imagination and that is what I want Ethereum to do as a crypto protocol. I want it to be something can build anything on top of."
Q. How does creating Ehereum work with your Bitcoin work- are you now competing?
It's a partial competitor to Bitcoin but I would think our loyalty is less to Bitcoin the currency, as to the space as whole. I think we all see each other as working on the same thing."
Currently the launch of Ethereum has been pushed back a week. When it goes live there will be a period where you can buy into the "currency." But that will be as part of its fundraising round (think of it as beta-Bitcoin,) rather than actionable as yet. Buterin aims to have a complete launch within two months.
What you need to know about Ethereum: (There is a whitepaper here, but we wanted to break it down for you)

• There will be an unlimited amount
  
• You can mine it
  
• You need Bitcoin to buy it (for now)
  
• You can build applications on it, e.g. a Dropbox of social platform
  

http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/ethe...ear-403864

[Magda Hassan]

Will it be easier to launder drug money? My guess is that it will be a lot easier. A cinch, in fact. Hookers already carry wi-fi card machines for instant digital payment, and it's billed on your credit/debit card as some sort of 'service" or similar, that won't alert your wife/partner to your perfidy.

Services provided: Catering, wholesale, erection and demolition services.

[Lauren Johnson]

Will it be easier to launder drug money? My guess is that it will be a lot easier. A cinch, in fact. Hookers already carry wi-fi card machines for instant digital payment, and it's billed on your credit/debit card as some sort of 'service" or similar, that won't alert your wife/partner to your perfidy.

Services provided: Catering, wholesale, erection and demolition services.

Sounds like to me this is a no-brainer. First, I always thought a cashless society was a ridiculous idea since it would shut down the drug trade with all the advantages that it holds. But when it actually makes the transaction and the laundering practically instantaneous ... shit. Second, not only does it make the drug trade much easier, it can also shut down the underground economy and expose it to taxation. Talk about economic domination of billions of people, all in the name convenience.

FWIW, Friedrich Engels wrote an essay on the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, and focuses on the 13th chapter, and its famous critique of economic domination of an empire that the author calls the beast that arises from the sea. For Engels, Revelation was a clear statement of the evils of imperial Rome at the time it was written -- not about some time in the future.

The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

I write only to remind us that economic domination is an old story; the Apocalypse of John being a book belonging to a literature of resistance.