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Comment by ForHackernews

4 months ago

> I will say, the BTC appreciation is a big attraction of course

What are the other desirable features of BTC?

26 comments

ForHackernews

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lotu  4 months ago

It’s great for laundering money.

  • berkes  4 months ago

    It is not.

    It's not anonymous, but pseudononymous. It's a public ledger, for everyone to copy and analyze. It's a public ledger that's mathematically proven to not have mistakes in it.

    Exchanges are highly regulated. KYC is rediculously tight.

    Sure, Bitcoin allows one to flee/fly to some criminals' paradise with their entire wealth stored in their brain (or on a napkin). And as long as they keep the money in crypto or black, it's unstoppable, really.

    But it's a terrible medium to turn black money into white money. One of the worst of all options, really. And that's what laundering is.

    Now, it's used for laundering. But that's more because its a great and easy store of value in itself. Not because a public, tracable ledger without any anonymity other than pseudonimity is a great system for laundering, because it's the exact opposite of that.

    And certainly, if you mix in monero, defi, otc-trades and -there they are- "corrupt bankers", crypto as a whole can turn black money into white, circumvent blockades, fund terrorism and whatnot. But hardly easier or simpler than paper-money, gold, and corrupt bankers already can.

  • amelius  4 months ago

    It's great for transferring ransoms. Basically a criminal's dream coming true.

    • berkes  4 months ago

      It is unstoppable, permissionless and pseudomic. All but the last is indeed this criminals dream.

      But cash isn't pseudonomic, it's actually anonymous. It's even (practically) untracable. Cash is also unstoppable and permissionless. So it's far more a criminal's dream. Cash, however, isn't easy to transfer, especially larger values. It gets harder even if that transfer is internationally. Bitcoin solves that.

      Bitcoin's upside of being very easy to transfer, sometimes outweigh its downside of being hard to launder, being tracable. But let's stop the myth that it's so much better than all existing systems to move criminal assets around, because it's not. It's complementary, not a holy grail. It really has a lot of weaknesses, especially to criminals' needs.

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  • derangedHorse  4 months ago

    It isn't, banks are way better and cash is still king:

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/10/investing/td-bank-settlement-...

    https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...

    https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...

    https://www.coinbase.com/blog/fact-check-crypto-is-increasin...

    Even from SWIFT: "Identified cases of laundering through cryptocurrencies remain relatively small compared to the volumes of cash laundered through traditional methods" https://www.swift.com/sites/default/files/files/swift_bae_re...

    What you're saying is simply unsubstantiated.