> There is not much actual legitimate usage

To make an definitive statement like this, with no sources, shows the inherent bias you have.

In reality, apparently a lot of people use BTC for quite a bit of actual business.[1][2]

[1]: https://bitpay.com/blog/bitpay-growth-2017/ [2]: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitpay-reports-processing-over-1-bi....

Bitpay claiming to be the largest payment processor bragging about $1 billion yearly transaction volume.

The trading volume yesterday on the other hand was nearly $2 billion.

So that would mean that the demand for bitcoin in bitcoin markets for actual usage of bitcoin is one part in 700?

I think that counts as not much actual usage.

FYI the trading volume on global forex markets (fiat currency pairs like EUR/USD) is $5 trillion/day, while global GDP is ~$0.2 trillion/day.

There are lots of trading bots shuffling amounts back and forth without actually buying anything. High speed trading is no different, it's not like the computers are buying, say, actual physical bananas; they are just trading back and forth.

Would you happen to know the ratio of dollars traded vs spent?

> as speculation, for criminal activity, and for money laundering.

you are thinking of the US Dollar :)

They said the same thing for Internet. It is used for p*rn, drug-dealing, etc.

No -- since the early days of the "World-Wide Web", there were plenty of uses: colleges all hopped onto it, entertainment websites popped up, the first version of IMDB was mind-blowing, Yahoo! v1.0, James Berardinelli's movie reviews site... the list goes on and on.

Anyone saying it was just porn and drugs would just be disingenuous.

But Bitcoin, I'm not sure I've encountered a single "Pay with Bitcoin" option in any online shopping I've done. So where are the legit use cases hiding?

I've seen it from time to time. For a while, Dell was accepting BitCoin transactions, so you could, say, purchase a laptop with BTC (they seem to have since shut it down)[1].

More recently (last year) I came across a VPS provider accepting BTC. I think there are VPN providers accepting BTC, but I'm not familiar with that market space.

That's just what I've stumbled across. Google searches seem to bring up more, but... yeah. Seems to me to be a pretty large chicken-and-egg problem. Something that could take off, but needs a substantial catalyst.

[1] https://blog.dell.com/en-us/we-re-now-accepting-bitcoin-on-d...

I sold a motorcycle over craigslist a couple years ago and I would have much preferred to have the buyer send me bitcoin instead of giving me stacks of 50s. I wasn't able to demand a cashiers check and I wanted to make sure the sale would go through that day. Cryptocurrencies are amazing for large (legit) p2p transactions.

What would have been better about BTC for that instead of cash? Just the PITA of having a giant pile of physical money to deal with?

Exactly 1) possibility of a miscount & time it takes to count all those bills 2) fear of forgery/fake bills 3) carrying the cash on my person to the atm while living in a sketchy neighborhood 4) no “proof” of how much he paid if it came down to a court/tax dispute

Cool, thanks for the reply

In Switzerland you can pay for transportation (mainly train) tickets with Bitcoin, if you fancy

You can pay on digitec.ch with Bitcoin as well. Also, if I remember correctly, one can pay with Bitcoin on Steam as well.

Sorry, I am not saying early WWW was for porn or drugs. I am saying that was what ordinary people thought of internet. Similar concept is happening for Bitcoin as well.

> It is pretty bad for privacy as the whole idea is that the entire transaction history is public and permanent.

Yeah, I get that there aren't a lot of options besides Bitcoin for unbanked transactions, but there are a lot of potential ramifications around the radical publicity inherent in blockchain-based currency.

If whoever held the coins 3 transactions ago ends up getting in big-time hot water, should I expect the feds to try to confiscate them? I would at least be under additional scrutiny in order to determine what association I had with the illegal enterprise, being so close in the chain. Bitcoin tumblers and mixers only do so much to prevent this, especially as people have started discriminating against "tumbled" btc.

Minor correction: Radical publicity is not inherent to all blockchain-based currencies. Take Monero as a counter-example. AFAIK in Monero no one can query the balance of any address except the key holder for that address, and no one can see the sender, recipient, or value of a transaction except those party to it.

I believe I've read about people in developing countries with high inflation in their government's currency rely on bitcoin but I don't know how true that is. I've never bought anything with bitcoin and I hope I never have to.

This appears mostly to be wishful thinking by bitcoin gamblers in non-developing nations.

Which in most cases wouldn't be legal locally, which fits under money laundering. Morality might be a little more indeterminate depending on the situation.

It's only money laundering if you're using cryptocurrency to get out of paying taxes or to hide criminal activity. It's not money laundering to buy something instead of keeping your money in a currency undergoing inflation.

Money laundering is attempting to hide the source or destination of funds. Hyperinflation states will usually have strict currency controls in place and Bitcoin is useful in that situation to get around those controls, the whole idea being... its usefulness in hiding the flow of funds.

See Venezuela