You can buy drugs or a hitman online without being traced.

Also ransomware can demand payment in Bitcoin without being traced.

By design all movements of bitcoins are in the open, so I don't know about not being traced.

Because when you create a new BTC wallet you give the network your SSN and other identifying credentials yes?

Also, I can buy a pizza for a coworker in a different country without worrying about exchange rates or anything else.

FYI, everything you said can be done with cold hard cash.

You can buy your coworker a pizza with your credit card today. At most the fee would be 3%. From start to end the whole process would take no more than 5 mins. Plus, pretty much every decent pizzeria on the planet already accepts it as payment.

The BTC transfer fee is something like $20 now, more than the cost of a pizza, and the transaction might take like an hour to clear? Maybe it's fine if you don't mind overpaying, aren't too hungry, or you enjoy cold pizza.

> BTC transfer fee is something like $20 now, more than the cost of a pizza, and the transaction might take like an hour to clear? Maybe it's fine if you don't mind overpaying, aren't too hungry, or you enjoy cold pizza.

Segwit transfer is currently at $0.003, and a transaction with enough fee processes instantly. It takes 6 confirmations for a guarantee (but that will settle over the next hour). Pizza deliveries get paid in cash through many extensions that provide BTC2CASH purchase.

I can bet you buying a pizza in Spain with Spanish currency using a US card will charge you a foreign exchange fee.

> I can bet you buying a pizza in Spain with Spanish currency using a US card will charge you a foreign exchange fee.

That sounds like a personal choice. There are plenty of banks that don't charge fees for purchasing in foreign currencies. Monzo and Revolut both spring to mind here in the UK, and I believe both are now available in the US.

Is there no exchange rate from your country's currency into Bitcoin?

Yes, but there are usually no exchange fees.

Most of the other ways require a trusted third party. The position of the trusted third party is attractive to rent-seekers and often generates conflicts of interest. Automating the position of trusted third party with an algorithm has value, not because the algorithm works better than a reliable third party, but because it doesn't have any interests of its own that could come into conflict.

Bitcoin itself is not at all the best tool for this job, its value comes from the fact that it happened to be first. It's valuable for the same reason antiques are valuable.

> There are many ways of transferring money across the internet.

Only through a centralized intermediary (e.g. PayPal), which may block the transfer, freeze funds, deny access, go bankrupt, etc. Bitcoin allows direct peer-to-peer money transfers (a bit like cash but digital).

> Why is Bitcoin special if that’s the reason for its value?

Personally, I feel that the censorship resistant and pseudonymous p2p money transfer is a nice feature but the killer feature is that it's a money that can't be manipulated by any one entity. Its rules are pretty much set in stone. Since it is politically neutral, it is well suited for becoming an internationally accepted store of value / currency.

> Its rules are pretty much set in stone.

Not quite. The miners collectively decide what rules to follow. A majority of them forming a cartel to collectively skip certifying certain transactions is completely in the realm of what’s allowed by the network.

> Not quite. The miners collectively decide what rules to follow.

I don't mind being nitpicked but what you wrote is more incorrect. Miners can't unilaterally decide what rules to follow even if a majority of the hash power formed a cartel. Non-mining nodes also validate the rules and would reject mined blocks that violate consensus rules. The worse that a majority cartel of miners could do is perform a double spend attack or bring the network to a halt but that's hardly surprising.

Yes. But if the minority gets wind of that, it could create its own hard fork and keep out known members of the cartel in the future. Something like the opposite happened with Ethereum in response to the DAO hack, when the majority rolled back a transfer of ethereum by a minority of wallets that followed the rules as written but were against the intent of the rules.

Crypto is often sold as 'anarchy with rules' but it's not really that. Nor is it oligarchy as is the case with fiat and central banks. Crypto is in fact democratic. I wonder whether that's why it's unpopular in certain circles.