Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has lots of uses:

- Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes.

- Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin.

- Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

View on HN

For drugs you must mean Venmo or Cash App, where orders of magnitude greater numbers of drugs are ordered.

Not remotely, unless drug users have become much more trusting since I was last in the US.

The quantity and dollar value of drugs sold person to person in the US is orders of magnitude greater more than that of global darknet markets, and the amount of money being transferred by Venmo and Cashapp is growing, people are becoming more trusting.

I know one person who runs tens of thousands of dollars via Venmo and other apps selling weed and hard drugs in SF. Of course, in SF I doubt they even have a law against selling drugs.

Bad news travels fast, so there's lots of criminal subgroups. Bitcoin and crypto are dwarfed by financial speculation and DeFi.

>- Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

What are the transaction costs like on BTC these days? I'm surprised many people still bother with BTC given the enormous costs I've seen.

Looks like it's US$4.614/transaction.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f....

Perhaps delve into this tx from 2 weeks ago:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/d56ae8052711ac81cb68a0ccf3...

You don't pay in BTC for drugs though. Montero is usually preferred and transactions are much cheaper and private.

It's not, the dominant currency on darknet is still Bitcoin. Even Litecoin is more used than Monero. Criminals are stupid.

Use the Lightning network.

Just wish I could tip my postman! He has been looking real sleepy, man.

> Getting money out of China

Replace `out` with `{in|out}` and China with `<any country>`, and now we're in agreement.

> - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

Sounds like a much better experience than getting shot when trying to get your dose (if you're an addict).

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

Yeah, sure, buying an extremely volatile asset with ~2x price swing within recent couple of years is much less risky than paying 0.4% per year, while actively moving your assets to a different jurisdiction.

And the anonymity is guaranteed by design. You just send your billions through a couple of mixers registered to phony IDs and it they magically get obfuscated because hey, other billionaires do that every day as well.

There's no need for anonymity. I don't understand why that's relevant.

> extremely volatile asset with ~2x price swing within recent couple of years

Can be hedged with futures. Also S&P 500 had ~1.5x price swings recently and no one cared. The derivatives market has solved the problem of volatility in all markets not just Bitcoin.

There are already several billionaires who publicly say they have lots of BTC, prob many more who don't speak up. Jack (8B), Chamath (1B), Paul Tudor Jones (6B), Winklevii (1 B), Peter Thiel (2B). Eventually it will be known as the tax haven coin (already kind of is) and that will be its killer app.

>There's no need for anonymity. I don't understand why that's relevant.

A US wealth tax would obviously apply to BTC holdings too.

That would be impossible to enforce or prove. Bitcoin may not be anonymous but it is pseudonymous. The government could make a case that you own this or that public key hash, but that can be litigated till kingdom come since they have no physical evidence. This is assuming our standards of jurisprudence as we know it would still exist in the future where the government attempts to seize coins. I suppose the government could always torture you. Imagine a world where the government tortures citizens to extract Bitcoin because they are forced into a corner by the abandonment of inflationary currency and they have to resort to actually "earning" money. That seems a bit extreme though (just to collect taxes) even for warlord countries let alone the USA. Which is why it wouldn't happen--there wouldn't be a government at all in that scenario, it would just disappear, and humanity would finally be free as it once was.

>That would be impossible to enforce or prove.

I am confused. In your view of the world, does KYC/AML not exist at bitcoin exchanges?

And what would that achieve? Leave financing of national institutions to the lower classes that are already exploited by said centimillionaires?

The national institutions you speak of are the ones doing the exploitation. I wouldn't lose any sleep if they'll have to cut back on droning villages or putting poor people in prison because Bitcoin disrupted their funding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com