In 2006, before Silk Road, before Mt. Gox, there was Liberty Reserve a Costa Rica–based digital currency that quietly moved over $6B through its black market rails. By the time it was seized in 2013, it had become the de facto bank of cybercrime, where transactions were irreversible, anonymous, and borderless.
It wasn’t Bitcoin, but it played the role first: a shadow financial system outside governments, run by founders who saw themselves as builders of the first crypto black market bank.
Liberty Reserve didn’t survive, but the idea it embodied unstoppable digital money was too big to kill.
Before crypto had exchanges, it already had outlaws.
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