If you’re a terrorist and you want to transfer money under-the-table across borders, what are your options?
Twenty years ago, you could get on a plane with a suitcase full of money, fly to another country and nobody would know.
Today, customs would likely catch you, as their monitoring is much better. They’d seize you and your money – even if you didn’t declare your money and valuables upon arrival.
“The banks are monitored, assets are monitored – everything is monitored but diamonds,” says inventor and co-founder of 6 Degrees, Roy Cohen. “Diamonds are not declared anywhere, they have no ID number, nobody can track them.”
6 Degrees has created a device that can inscribe diamonds with an invisible bar code, creating a way to track every diamond worldwide and cut down on billions of dollars worth of terrorist and criminal trafficking in precious stones.
“It’s one of the simplest methods [to traffic]; convert cash to diamonds, affix them to jewelry, fly to another country, sell the diamonds, get your money back,” Cohen said. “That’s why drugs, weapons [and] human trafficking can be run and can be paid [for] without anything but diamonds. Because if a terrorist organization pays in diamonds and you cut off the source of payment, you blockade its funding source.”
The company uses laser-inscribing machinery to invisibly encrypt an ID on the girdle – the widest part – of the diamond.
In terms of privacy concerns – because most countries do not want to release data about their citizens and the types of diamonds they own – the ID system doesn’t simply issue a serial number on each diamond. Rather, the data is partially encapsulated inside the diamond, and the other part of the identification – a cryptographic key – is encrypted within the blockchain technology.
A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.