Awesome, between /b/, money launderers, the Silk Road, and its arms-dealing offshoot, bitcoin may have attracted the attention of all the scumbags on the internet!
Internet porn was an industry leader in offering streaming video, online payment processing, one to one video conferencing, and geolocation advertising.
Just because a technology is affiliated with a morally grey industry doesn't discount the value of the technology itself.
I have a whole bunch of reasons why I disagree with bitcoin in its current form proliferating. Most are to do with my feelings about relying on a currency without central controls, or about a curency with built-in deflation, or with the tiny number of people who (if it took off) would find themselves joining the ranks of the mega-rich simply for having run a program for a few days in 2009.
That it is associated with enabling the quasi-legal, the semi-legal and the totally illegal actually counts in its favour for me.
If you truly don't want to understand mining or how the blockchain protects the integrity of transactions, you can hold off on making cynical assumptions about its design. Early adopters to the network provided the computing power that lets the currency even exist in the first place. They also likely all sold their BTC years ago. The economic output of a few days of mining in 2009 could have never been more than a couple hundred dollars in today's money for even the best miners. In fact it has been a long time since mining had a good ROI, or even a predictable one.
If your deal-breaker is a centralized currency or your preferred economic theory then by all means ignore it, but I don't see how you need to care about its proliferation. Cash has the same properties anyway. Your dismissive/grumpy attitude reminds me of something Gandhi said about ridicule.
I've been ridiculing it since they day I heard about it, rather than going through any sort of ghandi-esque three step process. I took time to understand exactly what it is and decided the crypto was interesting but as a currency it's not something I could ever adopt in good conscience. The rules, set in stone since the beginning, are not a recipe for a good currency.
What's more the Randian/libertarian fanboys provide no end of amusement. The various ponzi schemes and robberies are terrible, and the reaction of the community just as bad.
So to me BTC is an unworkable currency with a toxic community.
You don't have to be a Randian hero to have interest in Bitcoin. Like you said, the cryptography is interesting. We can build scripts and sophisticated contracts and smart property and open transactions, all financial instruments that cannot be violated yet have enormous potential. Distributed bond markets and all of the curious things we can build on top of Bitcoin -- stuff that couldn't _exist_ before Bitcoin.
Imagine the federal reserve releasing their own Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency with their own inflation rates and restrictions. I could see it happening and I think it would be very interesting as well, maybe even more successful than Bitcoin. You do not have to subscribe to some libertarian fantasy to be in awe of what Bitcoin could accomplish. To simply discard all of that because criminal can use it, is a weak and lazy argument. I don't know how you could expect innovation to ever occur with currencies or economies without some growing pains and experiments.
Hell the lead developer of Bitcoin meets with the CIA to tell them how easy it is to track all of the economic activity of Bitcoin. These people are not trying to start a revolution they're trying to build software.
I'm sure the government will save you from the drugs and everything else you're scared of, so don't worry about it.
You didn't read my other comments then, the ones where I said that the illicit use is in BTC's favour in my book? And that my objections to BTC itself are economic?
Never mind, just sling insults about how closed minded and scared everyone is that disagrees with you...
Personally, I don't see Bitcoin replacing nationalized currencies like the USD as a store of value. I just see it as a great way to send and receive payments online. Kind of like PayPal, but decentralized.
For that use-case, it doesn't even matter if the value of BTC continues to fluctuate a lot over the course of weeks, since people only have to hold onto BTC long enough to trade with it, and then they can exchange back into more stable currencies, if they wish.
Sure, there are the Randian/libertarian fanboys, but whatever. They don't have any real control over Bitcoin anyway, and they're not too hard to ignore.
A lot of /b/ is comprised of noise, it's mainly a few very prolific users who use it as a rapid-fire chat room - whereas the rest of 4chan is used more like a message board. So of course, b has more posts. But even so, it's not true that most of the action on 4chan is /b/, and certainly not most of the users.
That's exactly my point (see above). I think taking into account the manner in which /b/ is used compared to the other boards, one can hardly make the point that 4chan is mostly /b/ - I'm surprised it has only 42%. Even if one were to make the assumption that all of /b/ is worthless, there is still a pretty decent amount of actual content left, and there are a lot of users engaging with it. I'd wager that even on a high-quality site like HN, more than 50% of all submissions are at 1 point or [dead]. At least 4chan has an officially sanctioned outlet for crap, keeping the majority of the boards pretty clean. /b/ is a necessary evil that's required for the (huge) rest of the site to function.
Because usually it's people that do shady things, not bad things maybe, just things that people don't want you to see, no matter if it's just trading pot or else, or even if you have the best intentions. If you do need/want to hide something, people will assume you are doing something bad, and therefore you are a scumbag. Personally I don't care but this is how the world usually works.
If you do need/want to hide something, people will assume you are doing something bad, and therefore you are a scumbag.
This is sad. I don't buy into this "You don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" argument. In my opinion OP was just trolling by wrapping up of a bunch of unrelated "things" in the statement.
I don't really, but I do find it amusing that the BTC fanatics try to push for mainstream acceptance, when what's actually happening is (predictably) it mostly gets used by the underground.
I'm strongly surprised that is not widely used for money laundering yet.
It seems perfect for the purpose of storing value and moving it semi-anonymously. Especially since you can just buy a bunch of very generic hardware with stolen money and mine pure money.
I'm hoping underground will adopt bitcoins widely before I'll be forced to sell the ones I own.
Maybe there has to be generation change for that, but luckily gangster generations are shorter than average ones.
Not enough coins. Money laundering is billions and billions of dollars. How does one anonymously move 1 billion dollars, without suspicion? Any large purchase or sale sticks out like a sore thumb.
Number of coins is pretty irrelevant (except for UX purposes, I guess). What matters is what's the total worth of the Bitcoin coins. Until all Bitcoins are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with thousands of dollars per Bitcoin (at which point everyone will be using "micro-coins" for daily transactions), they won't be able to do that.
I'm not sure whether it's that easy to break even on mining equipment and electricity any more, I think it was getting tight for a lot of folks. Unsure though.
As for money laundering - bitcoin laundry services do exist, I'm not sure how much money you could put through the exchanges without disturbing the economy significantly, but likely quite a bit.
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