Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto?<p>Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
I thought the #1 use case for crypto was ransomware, followed by shitcoin rug-pulls, and the ability to commit theft without recourse.<p>Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.
That's a rather narrow view of crypto's uses. What about subverting democracy by bribing the President?
Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening? Look up cases of gold bars being found in senators houses, those are actually MUCH less tracable.<p>Shitcoins and Shitstocks(some SPACs) do allow of a legal way to "give" others money through the transfer of value in a way that is technically legal. This again is not crypto specific though.
For me it was buying a computer from newegg but I confess I'm not playing in the same league.
Isn't it just a subset of #3?
Back in 2011 I remember a lot of people talking about how the Chinese oligarchs were using it to evade currency controls and funnel their wealth out of China.
What a deeply troubling and cynical comment.<p>As far as I know, nowhere in the Bitcoin white paper or the original code base. Does it say anything about what you seem to think it's use cases are.<p>Bitcoin has one main use, digital cash, that can be sent instantly and for free or a very low fee.<p>Edit: I would agree though, that anything other than that is probably a scam.
It seems entirely accurate to me, at least in a POSIWID sense.<p>The original theory of Bitcoin was, as described in the paper, decentralized digital cash. But in practice it was never optimized for what normal people use cash for. As system like that would be something like M-PESA.<p>Even at the time, cash was declining in usage. In the 18 years since, it has declined a lot more. And for good reason, because what most people want for most things isn't digital cash, but digital money. E.g., debit cards and Venmo.<p>So pretty naturally Bitcoin has value only for a few niche use cases that are not well served by more effective systems. Various sorts of crime, mostly. Digital cash, sure, but the kind that's transferred in unmarked envelopes slid quietly across the table. The kind that is delivered in a briefcase.<p>As a side note, it also failed in its goal of being decentralized. The mining power is very concentrated. Much more so than the banking industry, for example. And most users keep their Bitcoin on deposit in centralized services. So it's again basically banking but worse.
Men of principles often mistake the experience and observations of others for cynicism when it does not align with said principles.<p>This applies to a great deal, not just bitcoin.
the problem is as a means of cash it’s inferior to existing systems in pretty much every dimension. more expensive, slower, more risk, higher volatility. the cash story for crypto is not good.
What? "Instantly and for a very low fee"?<p>Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees.<p>And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending.<p>So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on.
Bitcoin via the Lightning Network is near cost-free and instant. And it's not a hack, it's just a network of payment channels.
>And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle
>Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction<p>So it's cheaper to use Paypal ?
They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again.<p>So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.
Pointing at the BTC transaction fee and saying it is super expensive is like pointing at a problematic car model and saying all cars are bad.<p>There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds.<p>You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coins, that happens to include BTC, but also many other much faster and cheaper options, that are used to globally remit payments every day.<p>What it's replacing, by the way, Western Union, Wise and the like, is also pretty unblockable and unrefundable.
What? I was replying to someone who explicitly referenced the Bitcoin whitepaper, they were clearly talking about BTC. And the protocol from the whitepaper was actually pretty bad, from a cost and transaction time point of view. It's gotten a bit better with some hacks layered on top of it.<p>And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up so much electricity on mining. The main difference is that they don't operate in some areas where BTC still can (like evading sanctions, like this), and the speculative nature of BTC (which is actually a net negative on using it as a cash).
Unblockable yes, untrackable no. Also portable is the main ability of crypto.<p>The reason that this could be found out is because every transaction is recorded so it can be linked back through the chain once it hits another exchange that is KYC'd.<p>If I have a gold watch and I wear it through the airport go to turkey melt it down and give it to an iranian, then buy a fake watch and return home noone will every know that this transaction took place.<p>This would be 100% impossible to track in any reasonable manner. If I went to an exchange transfered bitcoin to a person then they spent this bitcoin in a way that linked it to their identity this would provide a full audit trail that would link me to that person. Also this audit trail could NEVER be removed or altered.<p>There are ways to use bitcoin in an untracable manner just like gold, you can have a cold wallet and transfer the keys to someone else. The cold wallet password could be only memorized and thus have no physical trace and no transaction record could take place whatsoever, but this is the OPPOSITE of what an exchange does.<p>Also cash and bank systems are not as resistant, they can fail, be hacked, be altered, people can use shell companies and fake identities.<p>Some cryptos like monero try and hide the transaction path but even this crypto has some vulnerabilities making linking it to people possible in some cases.
It's also the #1 use case for $100 US dollar bills. Most US $100 bills, in fact, are not even in the US.[a][b]<p>US $100 bills are the currency of choice for small-time crooks around the world.<p>They are also the currency of choice for big-time crooks. Briefcases of US $100 bills have long been used for illicit payments, as depicted in numerous books and movies.<p>--<p>[a] <a href="https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/oct/innocent-greenbacks-abroad-us-currency-held-internationally" rel="nofollow">https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/oct/innocent-...</a><p>[b] <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/12/177051690/most-100-bills-live-outside-the-u-s" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/12/177051690/most...</a>
It's clearly not untrackable. It's never been untrackable. That's how they know it went to Iran.
Could someone explain to me where the myth of "crypto = untrackable" comes from, and why it's still being perpetuated?<p>Storing a record of every single transaction on a publicly accessible blockchain sounds trackable by design
In the case of bitcoin, surely.<p>Some other coins not so much trackable, and that's the reason some countries don't like them: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-delist-monero-zcash-4-153904972.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-delist-monero-zcash-4...</a>
The truth is there are some currencies that are by design untrackable—monero and zcash, for example, which use privacy preserving techniques to avoid tracking. (IMO zcash is a better implementation than monero, but shrug.)<p>Bitcoin and ethereum and most other crypto currencies are absolutely traceable in the sense that anyone can see who you send your money to. And all of the implementations have the core challenge of getting back to fiat—at some point, you withdraw cash or otherwise pay a real person to do something for you. There’s no way around that.
I think it’s part of the Origin Story.<p>Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto almost 20 years ago. There are a number of wallets that people believe belong to Satoshi (have they proven they belong to SN?)<p>Yet the identification of Satoshi has eluded a global hunt to identify him. Maybe law enforcement has not been involved, but the mystery definitely suggests that BitCoin can help mask identity.
It's the overconfidence of 90s kids who knew how to program the VCR and use the modem.
> Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency<p>Isn't this the opposite of crypto? It's literally the most trackable thing you can think of. It's defined by its trackability (immutable, permission-less, verifiable ledger of every transaction in history)
It’s 100% trackable. It’s anonymous but there are many datapoints that could be used to deanonymize if the transaction parties are not extremely careful
The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... <i>just like they use cash</i>. The unavoidable cost of freedom has always been that some people will misuse it. Personally, I would rather have freedom even if it gets misused than not have freedom even if it means crime is over.
> <i>The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime...</i> just like they use cash.<p>Not <i>quite</i> like cash: collecting and transferring US$1.7B in cash—actual physical paper—is probably more logistically challenging than BTC.<p>I understand the argument for freedom, but depending on the scale/dosage many things that could be fine in small quantities aren't as good in large ones.
Money laundering is only good when our people are doing it.
> Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto?<p>What is even the point of crypto if you can't commit crimes with it?
What's funny is that Bitcoin/Ethereum are now the most tracked ledgers on the planet. If I wanted to do some shady value exchange it would be my last choice.
Can't anyone basically sanction entire wallets, and mark them, and make some legislation that any transaction involving coins originating from those wallets be rejected by all payment processors and exchanges in regulated markets?<p>I mean, they obviously can, but probably they have elected not to do so. But if crypto becomes a tool in the hands of enemy nation states, such regulation can't be soo far off.<p>Though that would create a secondary market for these 'tainted' coins, and would probably have far-reaching consequences into the crypto ecosystem.
OFAC already sanctions crypto wallets. <a href="https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/594" rel="nofollow">https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/594</a>
You can't track individual coins, so you'd have to "taint" entire wallets. Using a mixer would taint the mixer and every wallet it sent to. I'd think this would end up tainting almost everything before too long.<p>Bitcoin also doesn't require the receiver to authorize a transaction, so if you had control of a tainted wallet, you could taint other wallets at will, wielding it like a weapon.<p>Doesn't seem feasible. Not that this always stops legislators.
It seems to me that the people who want the unblockable currency out of government control are not the same people who want to block money transfers to countries like Iran.
you mean its not used for the Paul brothers latest meme coin rug pulls?
I'd argue the #1 use case is ransomware and scamming, but this has to be a close second. Honestly the journey from "The blockchain is the future, everyone must see that" to where we are now really feels like the one we're taking with 'AI'.<p>In the end it will still exist, but the use case is going to be so much less inspiring than people want to believe, outside of medical and fundamental research at least.
Not just the #1 use case, the only use case. Real money is better in every scenario other than crime.