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This.
And it's not really useful even in black market, since the whole bitcoin blockchain is transparent, nothing is private.
In essence bitcoin is not fungible like cash, moreso the coins can be tainted. If a pseydonumous address has been used to buy drugs, you only need to look at the blockchain and see that those coins were used in illicit activity.
Have you tried using it? If not how can you say if it is useful or not? Plenty of people use Bitcoin to buy charlotte's web for their epileptic daughter and other things, so clearly it's useful for them.

Bitcoin is not transparent, if it was drug dealers would not use it. It may not be anonymous but it can become anonymous enough using mixing services that all black market sites use. Though some people prefer to use Monero just to be safe.

In practice it's really hard to know if the bitcoins you get for that coffee you sold at your cafe was tainted or not and the shop owner doesn't really care as long as coinbase will convert it to dollar if he wants. And coinbase will do this. For very large transactions such as a Mexican cartel getting paid for the shipment of cocaine to California the DEA might actually care to trace it if they can, but not for every random transaction on the blockchain...
 
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Have you tried using it? If not how can you say if it is useful or not?

A while back I'd acquired two bits of BTC. Quite small amounts at the time (years ago).

When I wanted to combine them the service told me it'd cost like 1/3rd (in USD value) of what I had to add it to the other bit.

That's a moronic system, period full stop.


Plenty of people use Bitcoin to buy charlotte's web for their epileptic daughter and other things, so clearly it's useful for them.

Plenty of people vote for horrible candidates, smoke crack, or think the Kardashians are awesome too.

"Plenty of people do it" is not evidence of something being a good idea.

What's the transaction cost for a timely purchase of a $5 book in BTC?



Bitcoin is not transparent, if it was drug dealers would not use it. It may not be anonymous but it can become anonymous enough using mixing services that all black market sites use. Though some people prefer to use Monero just to be safe.

"No, I assure you there's totally safe ways to use it for crime!"

I'm not sure this is making the pro-BTC argument you seem to want to make.
 
Have you tried using it? If not how can you say if it is useful or not? Plenty of people use Bitcoin to buy charlotte's web for their epileptic daughter and other things, so clearly it's useful for them.

Bitcoin is not transparent, if it was drug dealers would not use it. It may not be anonymous but it can become anonymous enough using mixing services that all black market sites use. Though some people prefer to use Monero just to be safe.

In practice it's really hard to know if the bitcoins you get for that coffee you sold at your cafe was tainted or not and the shop owner doesn't really care as long as coinbase will convert it to dollar if he wants. And coinbase will do this. For very large transactions such as a Mexican cartel getting paid for the shipment of cocaine to California the DEA might actually care to trace it if they can, but not for every random transaction on the blockchain...

In other words, Bitcoin is perfect for crime. And nearly useless for everything else other than speculation.
 
P.S. People who have Bitcoin, either because they bought it early and got rich on the speculation, or because they bought in late and lost half their investment, may spend it at the few merchants that accept it. That does not make it useful. It just means that you can convert it to dollars, at an exchange rate that fluctuates wildly from one moment to the next.
 
And yet Bitcoin seems to be the preferred currency in ransomeware. Unless I'm behind the times and they've moved to a different cryptocurrency. Either way, ransomeware really took off in a big way when Bitcoin became available.

But we're agreed: There no good side to crypto. It's a scourge on the environment and a menace to honest people everywhere. It made a few people incredibly rich, but since it produces nothing, that wealth all came from suckers who bought in later. This is contrasted to businesses that produce and sell something of value.

(And FWIW, I regard Musk's decision to put a billion dollars of stockholders' money into Bitcoin as criminal negligence.)

I'm 99.999% with on you everything said. I would toss in there that if you are LEGITIMATELY moving funds from country to country, crypto can be far easier and cheaper than traditional wires. They are the first "competition" to the banking system, for that specific use case, in decades.

My company has employees scattered across the globe, and for that use case, it does save us considerable bank fees each month.
 
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Have you tried using it? If not how can you say if it is useful or not? Plenty of people use Bitcoin to buy charlotte's web for their epileptic daughter and other things, so clearly it's useful for them.

Bitcoin is not transparent, if it was drug dealers would not use it. It may not be anonymous but it can become anonymous enough using mixing services that all black market sites use. Though some people prefer to use Monero just to be safe.
I used to own some btc, but could never figure any decent legal use for it.. sold them pretty soon after buying them.

As I understand, those mixers have pretty much been cracked and are not useful anymore in anonymising bitcoins. But I don't dwell in the dark web so I haven't really researched this.
 
Ok. It's not useful for you. But for plenty of other people it can be. I have used Bitcoin to pay my rent, to buy harddrives on newegg, to pay for flights, to donate to causes I support, to tip content creators etc etc. Sure the first few times it took some time. But so did banking, it's just that people have forgotten about the first time they did it. Once you have it up and running, it's trivial to use and the options are not always.

And yeah, Bitcoin was expensive to send for a while, cost up to $60, because so many people found it useful. Now it's down to $1. Still too much, that's one of the reason why I no longer use it. But saying it's not useful is not true, plenty of people find it useful and it's a lot better than the option for many things.

Buying illegal stuff like The Bible, used underwear, medication for drug resistant depression, treatment for opiate addiction among other things is one thing yes. Remittance another. Tipping another. Sending to the unbanked small merchants in Africa. Sending larger sums between countries is another. Wherever the alternative sucks, Bitcoin shines.
 
I'm 99.999% with on you everything said. I would toss in there that if you are LEGITIMATELY moving funds from country to country, crypto can be far easier and cheaper than traditional wires. They are the first "competition" to the banking system, for that specific use case, in decades.

My company has employees scattered across the globe, and for that use case, it does save us considerable bank fees each month.

Well and good if you buy, transfer, and sell the BTC before it loses a significant portion of its value.

Also worth noting that right now the cost of transactions is borne by the miners who profit from mining. At some point there will be too few coins remaining to fund the cost of transactions, and then the users will have to pay for transactions. When mining becomes unprofitable, because there are too few coins remaining to be mined, what happens to the nodes (or whatever they call the record-keepers)? The whole system is designed to collapse when mining stops.
 
Well and good if you buy, transfer, and sell the BTC before it loses a significant portion of its value.

Also worth noting that right now the cost of transactions is borne by the miners who profit from mining. At some point there will be too few coins remaining to fund the cost of transactions, and then the users will have to pay for transactions. When mining becomes unprofitable, because there are too few coins remaining to be mined, what happens to the nodes (or whatever they call the record-keepers)? The whole system is designed to collapse when mining stops.
We use stable coins for these transfers.
 
A list of 52 countries where the bible is illegal and/or severely persecuted:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. Iran
  3. Kazakhstan
  4. Kyrgyzstan
  5. Maldives
  6. Mauritania
  7. North Korea
  8. Saudi Arabia
  9. Somalia
  10. Tajikistan
  11. Turkmenistan
  12. Uzbekistan
  13. Yemen
  14. Algeria
  15. Bhutan
  16. Brunei
  17. China
  18. Cuba
  19. Djibouti
  20. Eritrea
  21. Kuwait
  22. Laos
  23. Libya
  24. Malaysia
  25. Morocco
  26. Oman
  27. Sudan
  28. Tunisia
  29. Bahrain
  30. Bangladesh
  31. Central African Republic
  32. Columbia
  33. Egypt
  34. Ethiopia
  35. India
  36. Iraq
  37. Jordan
  38. Kenya
  39. Lebanon
  40. Mali
  41. Myanmar (Burma)
  42. Nepal
  43. Niger
  44. Nigeria
  45. Pakistan
  46. Philippines (Mindanao)
  47. Sri Lanka
  48. Syria
  49. Tanzania
  50. Turkey
  51. United Arab Emirates
  52. Vietnam
 
A list of 52 countries where the bible is illegal and/or severely persecuted:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. Iran
  3. Kazakhstan
  4. Kyrgyzstan
  5. Maldives
  6. Mauritania
  7. North Korea
  8. Saudi Arabia
  9. Somalia
  10. Tajikistan
  11. Turkmenistan
  12. Uzbekistan
  13. Yemen
  14. Algeria
  15. Bhutan
  16. Brunei
  17. China
  18. Cuba
  19. Djibouti
  20. Eritrea
  21. Kuwait
  22. Laos
  23. Libya
  24. Malaysia
  25. Morocco
  26. Oman
  27. Sudan
  28. Tunisia
  29. Bahrain
  30. Bangladesh
  31. Central African Republic
  32. Columbia
  33. Egypt
  34. Ethiopia
  35. India
  36. Iraq
  37. Jordan
  38. Kenya
  39. Lebanon
  40. Mali
  41. Myanmar (Burma)
  42. Nepal
  43. Niger
  44. Nigeria
  45. Pakistan
  46. Philippines (Mindanao)
  47. Sri Lanka
  48. Syria
  49. Tanzania
  50. Turkey
  51. United Arab Emirates
  52. Vietnam

But you can buy one there with Bitcoin??? :oops:
 
But you can buy one there with Bitcoin??? :oops:
Check out the darknetmarkets, sellers sell The Bible, Mein Kampf and other illegal books. We can debate if these things should be illegal or not, but for some people who want them, darknetmarkets are one way of getting them. There are probably other ways also with different risks.

Imo check out some darknetmarket site and see what strange things are being sold. Read some reviews for fake currencies(these are sold a lot) and think what this says about the money in your pocket and know that the government is doing it themselves...
 
Are printers also illegal in those nations?

Because obviously if you can get to "the darknetmarkets" you can get a digital copy of those books- for free- on the whole rest of the internet. No bitcoin needed.

(also if these are the best pro-crypto arguments left, it might be time to pack it in and move on to whatever the next tulip fad is)
 
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Yeah: If you want a Bible, you can get one for free online. I used to have a print Bible. It got lost at some point and a preacher gave me another. He had a closet full of them, and many versions to choose from. Don't know if I have a hard copy any more because I can consult it online any time I want.

Yep, you can get a KJV Bible on Kindle for free. Probably other versions as well, but I'm partial to the KJV. If you have access to BTC and the dark web, you have a device that can download a free Bible.

And, no, I'm not going to visit the dark net.
 
Are printers also illegal in those nations?

Because obviously if you can get to "the darknetmarkets" you can get a digital copy of those books- for free- on the whole rest of the internet. No bitcoin needed.

(also if these are the best pro-crypto arguments left, it might be time to pack it in and move on to whatever the next tulip fad is)
Yeah, but some people want a physical copy of high quality. And this was just a few cases where Bitcoin is clearly useful, ie there are no good options for some people. Then there are many cases where Bitcoin is not needed but is superior. Then there are long term risk that Bitcoin eliminates. There is a reason why Bitcoin when from 0 to $1/1337 to $20000 giving it a $370B market cap. And if still cannot see the monumental achievement this was or understand why it happened, you are even more lost than the people who cannot understand the monumental achievement Tesla has accomplished and why it happened.
 
Oh I understand why it happened with BTC.

Stupid bubbles like this have been happening for centuries.

They always end the same way, and there's always folks like yourself trying to explain why THIS TIME IT IS DIFFERENT.

As I say, the fact your BEST answer for such a basic question as "what problem does this thing solve" is "Well, IF you live where they banned the bible.... AND you want a bible... AND an electronic copy isn't sufficient... AND a printer made one isn't sufficient... AND you can access the dark web... then HA! you can get buy a physical copy with BTC!.... I mean, mind you, it still needs to physically get to you... just like one bought with, you know, ACTUAL MONEY would... but... CRYPTO!"


The only real difference is unlike say beanie babies or tulips, the DISRUPTORS found a way to Bigger Fool their way to billions without even needing a physical product. So I guess that's KIND of an innovation :)


Tesla, in contrast, actually produces something of value that actually solves a problem.

You don't need 17 different increasingly crazy and unlikely contingencies to answer "what problem does Tesla solve"-- instead you not only have a clear obvious easy to understand answer... you have one where they're solving MULTIPLE problems.


And anyone who "got in on the ground floor" of it has many times higher returns than those who did with BTC.

The 5 year chart likewise has Tesla returns several times higher than BTC... The 1 year is even worse for BTC.

This gap is likely to get embarrassingly larger in the future.



Meanwhile years later I STILL have my two small amounts of BTC that it's STILL cost prohibitive to even combine, let alone actually buy something with. Thankfully I got them for free, because I'd be even more annoyed if any sort of actual currency was this dumb.
 
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Yeah, but some people want a physical copy of high quality. And this was just a few cases where Bitcoin is clearly useful, ie there are no good options for some people. Then there are many cases where Bitcoin is not needed but is superior. Then there are long term risk that Bitcoin eliminates. There is a reason why Bitcoin when from 0 to $1/1337 to $20000 giving it a $370B market cap. And if still cannot see the monumental achievement this was or understand why it happened, you are even more lost than the people who cannot understand the monumental achievement Tesla has accomplished and why it happened.

Bitcoin does not eliminate ANY long-term risk. BTC is a long-term risk: I.e. any money you put in BTC today carries the risk that it may be worth nothing next year. And that $370B "market cap"? That's people buying in for pure speculation: the hope that some day a bigger fool will pay more for it than they paid.

But you are right on one thing: There is a reason why BTC went from zero to $20,000: The reason is speculators gambling that there's always a bigger fool. Its only real uses are crime and speculation, and by far the lion's share is speculation.

Do you really want an economy based on a currency that offers zero remedy in cases of fraud? A currency whose value fluctuates wildly up and down from one day to the next? A currency the maintenance of which consumes a significant amount of the world's electricity production, mostly from cheap, dirty coal plants?

There's a difference of night and day between a digital token created from nothing and that produces nothing and whose value is entirely derived from the "bigger fool" theory, and a company like Tesla that produces actual physical things (cars, batteries, etc.) that have value because they are useful.

I will admit that if I'd gotten in early and had become a billionaire in Bitcoin, I, too, would try to convince people that BTC was not an environmentally disastrous scam.
 
Yeah, just like Tesla, Bitcoin is a bubble, pure speculation, just people hoping to sell to a bigger fool. Nothing behind it at all. You guys can have your fun gish galloping arguments, meanwhile crypto and Tesla has kept growing. Sure there has been time when Tesla and crypto has been down, but long term it has been an explosion of sold cars and transactions with speculation sometimes being behind and sometimes ahead of where it would be a few years later.

If you are so convinced of that it's a bubble, I challenge you to do what Spiegel had the courage to do. Short it! Or at least bet that it will be below price X at time Y on some prediction market. So far it has not been a winning play for most people:

Screenshot 2022-09-20 at 13.14.56.png

How will it end? I don't know. My position in Bitcoin is tiny right now, just some ETFs. Ethereum I am more exposed to, but not a lot anymore. But when I hear those repetitive arguments, I start to feel bullish again...
 
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Yeah, just like Tesla, Bitcoin is a bubble, pure speculation

I mean, you were just shown two different users explaining, in some detail, why that's the opposite of true for "just like Tesla".

But as lawyers say, when the law is on your side, pound the law... when the facts are on your side, pound the facts.

When neither is on your side, pound the table.

Good demo of that from you here.

, just people hoping to sell to a bigger fool. Nothing behind it at all.

Yes. That is LITERALLY what crypto "currency" is. There IS nothing behind it. It's valuable only because you hope to find a bigger fool to pay you more someday than you did. It has no physical presence or product, it produces nothing, it has nothing backing it as having value at all not even the things cryptobros mock as insufficient for real money (fractional reserves and an army).

The first thing it was supposedly useful for- money replacement- it's demonstrably worse at than actual money (no fraud protection at all, high transaction costs, low transaction speed and throughput, high volatility, etc).

The next thing it was supposedly useful for- inflation hedge- it was also demonstrably worse at- crashing just as inflation spiked.

Now we're down to 'Well, if you live in a muslim country it might be useful to order a bible on the dark web!'
(which also makes no sense- since if you can get to the dark web you can certainly use a VPN to get on the "regular" web and just order a bible with actual money.... not like EITHER won't need to ship to you physically so again crypto is like normal money with extra steps-- and worse results since you have no recourse if you never get your bible with it.


There's no "there" there.

Another great analogy is it's like owning stock in a company that doesn't actually exist.


Tesla in contrast actually physically exists, makes physical products that solve actual problems in the real world, sells those products for industry disrupting profit margins, had auditable financial records, and is scaling up those physical products and solutions and expanding into ever more areas solving ever more problems.

You'd be hard pressed to find any real company less like cryptocurrency than Tesla.
 
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