How to pay a drug/malware/CP dealer?
How to receive a bribe without physical exchange/trail?
Cash doesn’t work well for any of these use ases, while crypto (esp. Monero) is just perfect!
(HN is a very pro-privacy community, judging from Apple vs. Google discussions, so I take it for granted that a desire for privacy doesn't need further justification or elaboration.)
Choose a better one.
I don't know what to make of your strawman about Google. This thread was asking about problems Bitcoin solves. Bitcoin allows payments without an intermediary automatically divulging your identity to the other party to the transaction. It doesn't also need to end the arms race of consumer privacy in tech in order to be a useful advance for privacy.
Perhaps you don't consider those risks to you to be very big, so you don't place much value on mitigating them. Other people do, however.
That's exactly what I'm saying in my original comment, though. Do you think a government that wants to disown your assets cares if you have an entry in a database that proves that it's yours by law? THEY are the law, fuck your blockchain.
> The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation.
Again. People who are affected by this usually don't have the means to just log into Coinbase and buy some crypto. Even if, it's not like it's a very stable place to put your money in to.
If they cannot deprive you of the key, they cannot deprive you of use of the assets.
[1]: this is not to claim, as some do, that it is unregulatable, although it may be.