Hi Yankee,

Thanks for your input. Over the next 3 years, I will most likely be contacting different people and approaching the problem from different angles. The aim of this survey is to assess the community opinion.

As I stated earlier, this is effectively preliminary, exploratory research. There is very little formal research on the issue of crime with ecurrencies, so this is an attempted start. There is more to my research than just a survey - it will hopefully be available to be released, along with some information on how it was received (E.g. what mark I get - this is my Master dissertation.)

I chose to post here directly on community forums, as opposed to individually contacting bodies such as yourself and mtgox for a few reasons:

• This is a relatively short project, with relatively tight time and budget constraints
• I'm aware the Bitcoin community is relatively active, this community includes bodies such as yourself
• There's no guarantee that the biggest source of knowledge is contained in you, mtgox or any other big companies - particularly in such a large community
• The community opinion and the opinion of the users is, to me, just as valid when gauging the opinion of a community, as the opinion of the big players like yourself
• I'd like this survey to reach a wide range of people in the community. Contacting big players would give an inherently biased result: e.g. it's a possibility the big players have less direct association with crime, whereas some respondents on here will have first hand experience in buying/selling illegal things online.

For future reference, would have any issues with me contacting you over the next 3 years in the interest of research - maybe for something like an interview? As you pointed out, people like you are on the front line and therefore have a very valuable insight and domain of knowledge.

I'm aware of big parties within Bitcoin such as yourself are working with authorities. I wasn't at all implying that there aren't attempts by the community and such to curb criminal transactions. I can also appreciate why you perceive bias within the questions, I can understand how the questions can be interpreted as me implying that a lot of criminal transactions take place on Bitcoin. This is because the first part of the research has found strong evidence that Bitcoin is a primary payment system for a lot of illegal products and services bought and sold online, when compared to things such as western union, liberty reserve etc.

This survey isn't meant to assess the amount of crime within the community, or to even support the idea that there is crime in the community; it's purely to gauge community views and get some informal starting points for future approaches and research. As I said, hopefully, I'll be able to publicise the full research when it is complete.

Thanks again for taking the time to look at the survey and for your feedback - it would be good to talk further with you at some point:)

Dom.