Also accept payments from any where in the world, lower fees, financial privacy, open protocol allowing open competition. Many, many positives, not just illicit reasons.

> financial privacy

I agree with you on simplifying payment processing, but what exactly is financial privacy good for except tax evasion? Is there an epidemic of Visa/Mastercard/AMEX selling purchase histories to advertisers or something? Isn't that illegal?

Privacy is privacy - you don't know how important it is until you don't have it.

The main payment processors operate a mafia of sorts - it's a closed shop - tx fees are fixed and determined by them. One aspect of bitcoin is that is allows the person sending a payment & the person processing that payment (the mining pools) to negotiate the price. The theory being that transactions with a better tx fee will be included in blocks quicker than those that don't.

By freeing up these aspects of the systems we use to send & receive payment - you allow other forces to come into play.

What good is it to not let people know how much you make, how much is in your bank account or not wear a rolex in a ghetto? Tax evasion is not the only reason why you want your finances private.

>What good is it to not let people know how much you make, how much is in your bank account or not wear a rolex in a ghetto?

It helps protect the establishment and preserve the status quo. That's about it. It would be in most people's interest for these things to be public.

> probably money laundering.

If you want to launder money, it's extremely stupid to use a form of digital cash in which all transactions are public and any amateur data miner can have a go at tracing the transactions.

To add to this point, bitcoin transactions are not just public, they're permanently verifiable.

By making a transaction with an address you're not just telling anybody who knows you own that address that you've made a transaction; you've allowed anyone who later discovers you owned that address to prove you made that transaction, for the rest of history.

Couldn't you launder them through places like Silk Road? Set up a number of fake buyer/seller accounts and complete fake trades. I think the transactions go through a centralized escrow account which means they'd get mixed up with other people's? If you made your transactions equal in price to those of other users, it would make it pretty difficult to tell how the coins moved in and out.

It's called bitcoin tumbling. There a quite a few services that obscure the transfer of bitcoins by trasnfering randomized amounts to hundreds of different wallets before sending it to a central account.

But as someone pointed out in another HN thread, there is always a risk the tumbling service could be a legal risk if it's even taken over by a state entity, because they could technically know which wallets are being used.

USD has been the currency of choice for decades for this.. What's the difference?

Cash is anon as cryptocoins are.

Can't shove a dollar bill down a Cat 5 cable.

If you could, I am sure few people would have bothered with crypto-currencies, or for that matter, paypal...

Sending cash is slow, prone to failure (compared to bitcoin, at least), and still potentially trackable.

Bitcoin is slow - the accepted "confirmation" for a payment is 6 confirmations - best case (a tx just before a block is formed and it's included in the block) it'll take an hour. Worst case it's a couple of hours.

If you're sane and keep backups then your wallet is safe.. Your HD crashes and you don't have backup.. bye bye funds.

Bitcoin in many ways is equiv to cash - just electronic - it's an anon as cash is, as mutable as cash and prone to loss if you don't take care of it.

I like it - as a concept it has some nice attributes.