Comment by Animats
4 years ago
Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
4 years ago
Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
Interesting it’s like meta money laundering. It allows regular folks to make money off the illegal economy.
In some ways this was the extra profits banks made off illegal activities but that was largely held within the bank, not available to normies.
Is it regular folks, though? I imagine it's mostly big whales who are probably also doing shady stuff, too. We're talking about people doing money laundering, so financially savvy.
Few outside people get rich off the mafia.
My random lawyer is buying crypto. So they get to have their value increase as all the shenanigans goes on.
Gold has a usecase for jewelry, manufacturing electronics, dentistry and glassmaking. Yet not even the sum of these applications can justify its market cap of $11.73T, so the difference must come from speculation. I suspect the same is true for Bitcoin.
The difference is that gold has useful applications which act as a floor for pricing and moderate fluctuations. Gold bugs can still lose their shirts speculating but a normal buyer knows the value will never be zero.
Bitcoin is in contrast a pure fiat currency with very weak backing. Nobody has a need for it which can’t be satisfied at least as well by alternatives and it requires a very expensive always-on network to perform transactions. The floor is zero and liquidity is a very real concern.
>Nobody has a need for it which can’t be satisfied at least as well by alternatives
Have you ever tried to send more than $5k, $10k or $20k before? You basically can't with your bank without having to go through a bunch of hurdles or time delays. I can easily do that with bitcoin.
Legit, real need for it that can't be satisfied with alternatives.
In addition the bank is often closed on weekends, and doesn't service you into the night. My bank site "shuts down" at night. Sorry, but my ability to use my money isn't limiting by your waking hours.
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And how do I send money to pay a bill with pre-existing systems?
Pay a third party like Venmo, Square, etc a fee, or use my banks (also horribly designed and bad UX system) to send the money slower than watching paint dry. I'd rather pay the Bitcoin Miners that fee than a third party or even by bank.
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Now that Monero exists, not really.
The only coin that's actually stable, because it's the only one that has any actual purpose.
Yeah speculation would ruin the black market.
It must be safe to do tax evasion, money laundering, and drugs with a system that is transparent and traceable till the beginning of its existence.
But it's infinitely pseudonymous, and can be easily piped into more obscure systems.
It’s safe to launder money through banks too. And people do.
This is the only correct answer.
If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.
My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts.
All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Internet forums. I am middle-aged and find this worthy of countering as it appears obsessive. Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.
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That's a political publicity stunt, and does not counter any of the points made by the parent
Help me understand. Are you saying that former LEO are well-served from a PR standpoint by attaching themselves to the "points" you're holding are clearly evidenced by the parent post?
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(To help qualify my perspective and insistence... I was involved in stopping a long term predatory crime this year where digital assets were used to help protect the victim against perpetrators using dollars. As you might imagine, having clear records of transactions is likely to be more helpful to the targets than the perpetrators in these cases.)
You can use local heavies to protect yourself from bullies. That doesn't mean those heavies won't commit crimes in their spare time.
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