How to get a ransom without being caught?

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!

Far as I can tell bitcoin boosters are either people that can't trust people for some reason, like they are doing something grossly illegal. Or they hate having to trust people.

Reasonably private online payments. It's the closest to cash on the internet in terms of privacy.

(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.)

Not really. Your wallet address needs to be shared with others if you want to transfer money, and anyone that knows your wallet knows all of your transactions. If Google decided to build a crypto wallet into Chrome, I think you can agree it would trivial for them to see all of everyone's transactions.

I agree that BTC has terrible privacy. But this is a BTC problem, not a Bitcoin problem. A smart Bitcoin wallet would not reuse addresses across transactions, and would split your coins into many fragments, making them virtually impossible to trace. But to do this you need low fees and therefore big blocks - what BSV and BCH are doing. Several wallets on BSV already do this today, like HandCash (https://handcash.io), and the user experience is fantastic.

In case anyone reading this is as confused as I was: there is a schism in the cryptocurrency world where two forks of bitcoin, known as BCH and BSV, both still claiming to be bitcoin-but-not-that-other-bitcoin (BTC, the token meant by 99.9% of people who say "bitcoin"), have decided that their pope is the only authentic one.

Close. Bitcoin is a concept for a system - described in a whitepaper and in forum posts, and expressed in an initial release. BTC would prefer you think they alone are Bitcoin, but is the Catholic Church alone Christianity? Certainly not. BTC, BCH, and BSV are all implementations of that idea, each with various degrees of similarity to the original Bitcoin, and each of which share a history back to the genesis block. Interestingly, when you dive in, you'll see that BTC is the one that has diverged the furthest from the project's original goals and protocol, not the so-called "forks" BCH and BSV, which were both created from not wanting to change protocol rules. This is good reading if this viewpoint is new: https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com

This is not a battle you can win.

Choose a better one.

That's just a flaw of bitcoin, some other cryptos don't have this problem.

Almost any online transaction today (in the US, at least) involves a credit card or PayPal, either of which divulges your name and maybe location to the merchant. Bitcoin doesn't.

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.

Why bother answering if every response will be dismissed with "yeah but that's not a real use case"

The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation.

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.

> The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture.

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.

> 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.

If they cannot deprive you of the key, they cannot deprive you of use of the assets.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet