Drug money... while that was true at one point, you have to be the stupidest MF'er in this planet to deal with DNM tx with BTC at this point unless you have secure OPSEC (something most who operate DNM couldn't even do, see SR1/2).
The truth is BTC has more usecases than you are lining out, go look at Ukraine's Bitcoin address, that was what was using to fund early escape missions during the attacks of Russia when the central bank failed to operate and imposed liquidity collapse in the onset of the War. This was what led to the realization of United24, the official Ukrainian governments solution for continued fundraising (using not just BTC, but other alts too) for support in other critical needs--like invincibility centers that provide food/water/shelter in these war torn areas.
Want an even longer use case? Go look at Return Alive's BTC address going back a decade now, we as a community have been proving non-lethal aid to Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2013 when the collapse of their currency and capital controls and rapid inflation took over.
Really I can go on, and while I don't deny our past (in fact I'm quite proud of our origins as a means to transfer value freely on the Internet) you are misled to believe it still operates much volume towards those ends these days because of the analytics and monitoring that is being done 24/7 by intelligence agencies and 3rd party affiliates for just this. Hell, I bet there are more scams/hacks by the North Korean cyber military than there is in drug money.
Lots of stupid MFers out there. I know quite a few people who have mail ordered their drugs for 10 years using bitcoin. There’s lots of atms that cash in bitcoin out and have dubious identity checks. And there are still in person meetups to swap cash for bitcoin.
Not perfect, but easier than mailing cash or burner PayPal accounts.
This is also like the only use case for bitcoin in the developed world.
You’re missing the point entirely. Bitcoin will gain usability parity with the US dollar. And bitcoin is a better currency that anything mutable and controlled by governments. Bitcoin is a currency that is not subject to the whims of unpredictable central government financial policies. Bitcoin’s buying power fluctuates because we are still dealing with The Fed monetary policies. In time that will smooth itself out. Aside from violence (US military), what is the US dollar’s features that make it better than bitcoin in any way?
using USD doesn't make me look like a criminal or a scammer.
And it actually work and is useful for everything that isn't shady.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot: I can go to a bank and ask for a loan in USD that I can then use to buy a house, start a business, go on a trip, instead of risking of losing everything the day after. I can repay the loan in comfortable installments, at a predictable rate which won't bankrupt me because I have to acquire bitcoins that are deflationary, so basically in 20 years my debt will have nominally grown up, instead of losing real value, due to inflation, hence costing me less, and whose price is unpredictable.
But where BTC does have utility is the underground economy: prior to Bitcoin if you wanted to buy drugs online you’d have to hassle with burner PayPal accounts or relive the 1970s by mailing-off an order form with cash in the envelope and hope you aren’t being scammed while waiting 28 days for order fulfilment.
So long as there’s demand for contraband, there’s a utility for BTC - which means it has some value, independent of its stability. But because BTC is also, in a way, a finite-resource (which can ne easily lost forever on a HDD in a landfill site…), it means, in the minds of modern-day libertarian gold-bugs with mass undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, it’s a safe, deflationary investment. Which gives BTC value. Which keeps the general public at-large interested, as well as the NFT-toting, smooth-talking cryptobrahs looking to exploit everyone else’s ignorance - which leads to demand for BTC, and the inevitable physical and irrevocable loss of BTC (landfills, lost-phones, etc) which then drives the price higher. The cycle repeats. Forgive my ignorance, but I don’t believe we’ve ever seen anything quite like this kind-of perpetual-motion-machine in economics before (“perpetual-value-machine”?). This is why BTC interests me.
Perpetual-anything-machines are impossible - that’s a given; but I just can’t fathom BTC’s value being reduced to zero (absent a superior replacement, of course) simply due to drugs being illegal.