> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Though it’s not small amounts.
wait you can't
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/comments-on-the-white-house-...
I mean just think about it. A FULL 3%* of all cryptocurrency transactions are related to criminal activities! If we ban those 3% (and the other 97% because why not), we will stop all human trafficking or at least make a noticeable dent in it because most traffickers rely on cryptocurrency and absolutely don't use traditional currency as the main way to transact.
Perhaps if cryptocurrencies do finally get banned, it would at least help certain individuals to think more critically, or perhaps start thinking at all. One can only wish.
[*]: 3% because it's the most extreme reputable statistic out there. Most reputable studies place transactions related to illicit activities well bellow 1%.
Though those governments would love people like you who paint all the use cases as "organized crime, terrorism" etc
Every cryptocurrency-related post here in HN is flooded with extremely negative comments, even if the post itself does not promote cryptocurrencies. These people have seen countless examples of cryptocurrency scams, but they cannot understand what life under an economically oppressed or unstable country is because they never experienced it.
- People living abroad who are completely debanked because local banks refuse to open banks accounts for people who are merely suspected of being US citizns, despite them not being US citizns, with no path to resolve their predicament. This is a real problem that is effecting real people right now.
- Any legal activity that the banks and payment processors don't like for one reason or another; onlyfans, "right-wing" websites (whether actual or merely alleged), ...etc.
We no longer live in a world where you can live a dignified life with cash alone. Cryptocurrecy is a net positive to humanity, even if the technologies behind it may currently be more wasteful and make the lives of criminals a bit easier. There is simply no alternative for a lot of honest people in financial dead-ends the government can't or won't help.
Thank you Satoshi and anyone who works to support this technology for making the world a slightly better place.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how informed do you believe you are to be making these statements and what makes you so convinced working around sanctions is bad? Have you spoken to anyone in the countries negatively impacted by your government's sanctions?
Do you understand the humanitarian disasters and suffering caused by your sanctions and why someone might circumvent them, or are you just a marionette for ultra wealthy bankers and CEOs?
"We use bitcoin because it’s a good legal means of payment. The fact that we have bitcoin payments as an alternative helps to defend us from the Russian authorities. They see if they close down other more traditional channels, we will still have bitcoin. It’s like insurance."
They even use Paypal and card transfers for donations... Bitcoin is just another payment they accept in the hope it will be hard for the government to block funds... but they don't say it anywhere that's been the only way, or the best way to do that, it's just one of the ways they're looking and so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea... you make it look like Bitcoin is their saviour or something which is a gross misrepresentation.
Sure but if it wasn't significant, they wouldn't have mentioned it.
> so far has not been shown to be more government-resilient as I am sure getting the money out from the blockchain is not going to be easy if the Government doesn't like the idea
It seems you have no idea how bitcoin works then. All you have to do is memorize 12 words. You can then take your wealth to many corners of the world, some of which will be free from the tyranny of your government and still have an ecosystem which will let you cash out your bitcoin for the local currency. A good example - Dubai, where a lot of real estate is being purchased in crypto by the Russians fleeing the war.
Note that I'm talking about private property not personal property. Variations of the latter exist and have existed in almost every society but the concept of the former has increasingly been maximized to the point that patches of land, ways to do things, ideas in your head and sincere promises are now things you can own and exchange and people refusing to suffer hunger or lack of shelter are seen as unreasonable if they want to use what isn't eaten or isn't lived in.
Abolishing the state as long as other organizations (or individuals) are allowed to hoard resources/wealth/power seems as catastrophic a suggestion as abolishing the police as long as other gangs exist. You're just substituting one evil for another without affecting any material change.
No, most are not. (I'd go as far to argue that even monero is not specifically designed to evade regulation.)
And it's a pandora's box anyways. So who cares.
The crime trope is ancient, old, and has been repeatedly debunked. The evidence for its prevalence simply isn't there—because Bitcoin is not anonymous.
(Also implementing money on it does seem pretty intelligent -- its a scarcity device -- peoble just seem to do stupid stuff with it)
Controlling who gets to put things in it in a decentralized way isn’t as important as many people think, at the end of the day almost all applications (other than currency) can just use a central authority to publish hashes.
It is impossible (without finding a SHA collision) to rewrite a commit in git.
And before you say “yeah but how do you know which SHA sums are the right one if you don’t trust branch names”, please reread the final paragraph of the post you replied to.
Thats why the word "and" is there in my sentence
a) single one time cost.
b) no list of approved or unapproved uses
c) unlimited free read bandwidth
d) all my users pay to change the application
I've looked at AWS, GCP, Firebase, bare metal and none of their offerings have the same pricing structure of blockchain nodes. The target audience for non-blockchain applications require a much larger funnel and friction to pay for anything, while my overhead costs of getting them into the funnel soar. Free tiers are okay but can't handle a spike in traffic. Audiences in the blockchain space have already crossed all the friction and have an insatiable demand for 1-click payment funnels.
This perspective doesn't really seem to arise in these conversations. But perhaps there is a counterpoint that I missed about some other cloud platform? This is very high impact for me and I can see many developers continuing to bring their audiences to this development platform.