> bitcoin is great for criminals

Never understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash.

The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn't make that easier, it makes that part harder. But "Bitcoin is great for criminals" is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don't actually know what they're talking about.

it becomes significantly easy to store money and launder it whenever, it's what all indian scammers do: get it out of the banking system into crypto

> and launder it whenever

Again, there is no "LaunderBTCAndTurnIntoUSD" function in the Bitcoin protocol...

> get it out of the banking system into crypto

And please describe how you do so without involved A) banks who look the other way and B) registered companies who handle the on/off-ramping from/to BTC.

When people argue that it makes it so much easier to launder money, please spend at least a minute to actually figure out how that will work in practice, and you'll understand that Bitcoin makes the laundering HARDER than what it is with cash, not easier...

Ok you seem to be pretty outdated I won't blame you for that so I'll catch you up to speed and when I refer to bitcoin I generally refer to any tier 1 crypto currency:

There is actually a BitcoinToUSDPipeline. The real problem is that the exchange crypto transactions are NON REFUNDABLE as you know, that means once it leaves the banking system (via making victim register a coinbase or kraken account, or register it for them using their credential information and compromised webcam for liveliness checks) you have an unlimited amount of time to do whatever. There are also various real life ways of bitcoin atm, using card to buy <1k giftcards (no kyc).

Okay you have your money in bitcoin, now what? Well, welcome to dex - decentralized exchanges. Using smart contracts you can wrap your btc into eth-btc, using etc-btc you can now trade it to any other crypto currency no strings attached and the most popular currently is tron.

Tron has tons of merchants which will simply swap from a to b from two different liquidity pools and those transactions are done off-chain and exist only on their database, since there are usually dozens of transactions mixed it becomes increasingly difficult to continue your investigation without having to use the slow legal route which is especially difficult if the merchant is offshore often ending up in a dead-end, at that point only INTERPOL really has the power and resources to trace it. Liquidity pools are used for perfectly legal reasons and it is not like tornado cash.

Now you have two choices: just spend the money directly (in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto), buy giftcards or if you don't really care and aren't doing anything interpol would be interested in just deposit to binance and withdraw to your bank account, depending on your local government they might not even care.

> so I'll catch you up to speed

Great, finally someone in this submission who know what they're talking about, exciting!

> in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto

Oh no, another larper. You cannot walk around Georgia expecting to pay everywhere in BTC/USDT like you would with cash or a standard card, and I'm not sure what you're basing the information on because it's surely not based on personal experience.

Guess we'll continue waiting for people with actual knowledge to drop by.

Georgia is from personal experience, everywhere I went was crypto accepted even the small coffee shops accepted crypto (none accepted btc tho) and just to clear it up: you don't rely on crypto for everything, small amounts via some kind of systematic b2b laundering to cover the bases and crypto for larger purchases (you can buy a car!). There are also people who will exchange thousands of crypto for cash in one go, the criminal infrastructure for crypto is massive.

Would you mind explaining what mistake did the Bitfinex hack perpetrators do? My understanding is that they were caught when they spent a bit of the money [0]. Because the transaction was on the public ledger FBI knew which wallet to track-which they did and the first few transactions gave the perpetrators away. But then again this is just my understanding. Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bitfinex_hack#Laundering

1) I mean, also great for anyone who sells stuff on places like Craigslist, where the recommendation is to take cash? Taking the standpoint "the consumer is always always correct and refunds should be trivial" sort of works for larger companies that can amortize scams, but you enable a different form of crime (fraud) by adding that feature to small-scale transactions. Hell: many of the modern payment rails you now have to use to buy stuff from vendors at fairs don't have user-accessible refund mechanisms, including Zelle.

2) To the extent to which you really want those features, they are no different than any other in their ability to be built on top of a decentralized database, but now can be done in a way where the rules can be open and anyone can experiment: as an example, you could put your funds into a smart contract that only can transfer money to other people through an escrow mechanism which holds onto the funds for a net-30 period and pays a small fee to the protocol; you then could have the people who own the protocol governance token (and would receive the fees) vote on members to sit on a refund arbitration council (which needs to be somewhat fair or people will stop using the network, crashing the fees they are paid, aligning the incentives in a similar manner to a centralized business doing the same).

> let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.

So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?

What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I'm so confused about how you're able to make the delineation of those who "murder and steal" to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many of the people whom they spend relatively insane amount of resources to target target: drug users/pushers, political activists, immigrants, etc.

Distributed ledgers are good for... targeted activists, people who don't want the government to have the power to arbitrarily weaken their buying power, people seeking safe drugs and medicines, just about anyone needing to be anonymous, and regular people who don't need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted. This "criminals" angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you're not the first to suggest it.

you could call them criminals, many do, activists are also criminals from the view of politicans I generally just used "who murder and steal" as a basic notion of "it's good for people who are in trouble with the law"

Legal and morally right are two different things though.

Laws at least have the advantage of being written down. Morals are different for everyone and not constant in time even in a single individual.

Laws aren't always written down. A good example is what happens if you criticize Israel - the government, if it notices you, will come down on you like a sack of bricks, even though there's no law that says "don't criticize Israel". https://youtu.be/zJt3omLLAuA

Likewise, there's no law saying "don't accept payment in Monero" but you may be jailed for money laundering if the government notices you.

criminals are not always bad people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrFs2_uhz-o

and to break it down lawfully or/and morally bad:

  lawfully bad, morally bad = bad and crypto is one of the major tools in your arsenal

  lawfully bad, morally good = neutral, but you are a prosecuted criminal, crypto is helpful for you but there are alternatives

  lawfully good, morally bad = bad, but not a prosecuted criminal, crypto is not that useful for you

  lawfully good, morally good = you are not a criminal, crypto is not that useful for you