ISIS-Associated News Website Starts Accepting Monero, Ditches BTC

An ISIS-associated news website moved away from Bitcoin and started accepting Monero as a currency of choice for public donations, according to the Whitestream intelligence company. In our Monero XMR news today, we find out more about the report.

According to Whitestream, the ISIS-associated news website is closely related to the Jihadist movement and they officially moved on with Monero donations as of June 21. The website in question seems to be Akhbar al-Muslimin which is a well-known ISIS supporting news website. The platform claims that XMR is much more private and unlike Bitcoin, it cannot be traced. The website also claims that Monero offers more privacy and tutorials about how to use, buy, and trade it. BitcoinExchangeGuide is the website accepting BTC donations since 2019 and there are now about $2700 located on the address.

Now it's official, #ISIS moved to @monero to raise funds from the public.

With the awareness we created worldwide, and thanks to our global collaborations, we were able to push ISIS out of the Bitcoin Blockchain pic.twitter.com/7bDjSH5UTT

— whitestream – Blockchain Intelligence (@whitestream5) June 25, 2020

People were quick to comment on the news and make jokes about it but Monero supports don’t think that ISIS using the cryptocurrency is a bad thing. One user even argued that one of the main factors that made BTC big was its anonymity. Now when people started realizing that bitcoin is not anonymous as they think, they are moving to other cryptocurrencies that are fully anonymous. Despite the popular notion that cryptocurrencies are used by criminals and criminal organizations as well as terrorist organizations, another report by Chainlaysis says that 96% of the bitcoin transfers set to exchanges actually belong to retails traders.

In the meantime, another report claimed that terrorists prefer less anonymity when they use cryptocurrencies because most of the anonymity coins such as Zcash and Monero are under fire from regulators because of the exact reason for being used by a terrorist, arms dealers, money launderers and drug dealers. The report by Electric Coin Company, the owner of Zcash, claimed that only a few criminals show interest in using Zcash, instead they want safety in numbers when using the Bitcoin network.

Also, A group of hackers configured Microsoft Azure network nodes and were able to mine Monero (XMR). The attackers managed to affect 10 notes of the KubeFlow learning machine which is a part of the Azure network nodes. Microsoft revealed more details about the discovery of the vulnerability which was exploited by the attackers in the Azure computer network.