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Comment by rfd4sgmk8u | Hacker News Reader

"Blame the Money".

No, money will always be used for crime as long as money and crime exists. People invent new crimes, People invent new money. Crime is the problem, not the money.

I would argue that money that can be used in this context is extremely valuable, as it is beyond the state. This is a very awful situation, and I feel for the victims, but the existence of cryptocurrency is not the problem, any more than cryptography is the problem wrt ransomware.

Tech can be used in many forms. Use it properly. Find and bring those to justice that do not. Don't blame the tools.

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Your argument ignores whether or not the technology makes the crime significantly more likely.

Technology comes with negative externalities.

The cryptocurrency world needs to accept that it does have negative externalities, and show that the benefits outweigh them, rather than pretending that they don't exist.

By that reasoning computers make ransomware possible, cryptocurrency just makes it economically viable.

Yes, and it's pretty clear that computing as a whole comes with a huge amount of downsides (hacking, revenge porn, video game addiction, etc). It's also pretty clear that the overall benefits outweigh the downsides.

I'm personally not convinced that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh the downsides.

I was surprised it wasn’t classified as some kind of counterfeiting scam tbh. When you mine crypto you are pretty much printing money. Sure yeah it takes proof of work/storage/stake ect but so does counterfeiting. The philosophical differences are kind of vague.

Mining BTC is as much like counterfeiting USD as mining gold is like counterfeiting USD, which is to say, not alike at all.

Except gold exists as a material/commodity. Cryptocurrency was invented.

When thr government prints money, it isn't counterfeited. When you mine crypto, it isn't counterfeited, because everyone is crypto's "government"

Crypto does not pretend to be dollars, so no it's not counterfeiting any more than the X foreign government printing Y non-USD currency is counterfeiting.

Yes? That's precisely the argument the parent poster was making -- technology (both computing and cryptocurrency and everything else) comes with both upsides and downsides.

In the case of general purpose computing, the upsides are obvious and massive. Whereas it's much, much less clear that the upsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh their downsides.

Sure, you could say the onus is on the people who use cryptocurrency for more than just crime or speculation to give proof about these uses, but for most detractors it'll never be enough, and for these users the benefits outweigh these negatives (or else they wouldn't be using crypto to begin with) so it's all an exercise in futility except maybe to convince any neutral bystanders one way or the other.

If I say cash and banks get used by the vast majority of organized crime I'd be factually correct, but I'd also be accused of whataboutism. In a world without crypto I'd be seriously hampered by an unfair economic system, so to me personally the pros outweigh the cons, but it'd be anecdotal evidence. Hope you see what I'm trying to get at.

I definitely understand what you're saying.

Whether or not a technology's pros outweigh its cons is some appropriately weighted average across all the people that it affects. The person who gets hit by crypto-enabled ransomware likely feels differently from you.

I also think there is some moral weight to particular benefits. Dealing with unfair economic systems is definitely a "better" benefit (for some definition of good) than those people whose benefits are currency speculation or ransomware.

> show that the benefits outweigh them

Governments and banks can't touch your money or see what you're doing unless they get your keys. What other reasons do you need?

We don't need anyone's permission or blessing either. We want our freedom back and society's gonna have to accept this. If that means more crime, energy consumption or whatever -- so be it.

Yet, very rarely do we hear about cryptocurrency being used for anything but speculation and crime. In fact, those are the only two proven usecases for cryptocurrency. Money you can at least use to buy stuff, so it has a marked positive impact on the society.

I live in the US and saw a BitCoin ATM in a gas station just the other day. I asked the cashier about it and apparently they take BC payments too.

So, at least where I live, you can "buy stuff" with BC.

You'll be waiting on that gas station for hours for the payment to go through.

Not really. Your wait depends on the attached transaction fee and current network conditions. If you cheap out, then yes you have to wait, but it's also entirely avoidable.

The original Bitcoin continued as Bitcoin Cash. Very low transaction fees and always included in the next block. BCH ftw

Yes which now stands at $37 on average which is probably more than you what you bought at the gas station. Ethereum fees are very high too. There are other currencies that are better with this. But currently my credit card does this at a fee of ~3% instantly.

Part of the problem is that the seller pays that, and not you

The average transaction cost is baked into sticker prices, so at the end of the day, it's the buyer who pays the transaction costs. It's like saying 'the merchant pays rent' - yes, in a way, but really no. The customers pay the rent for the merchant via mark-ups.

However, there are a number of benefits; for one, average ticket size is about 20% higher for credit transactions vs cash (if I recall correctly) and merchants do not have to hold onto and manage piles of cash. This is a material cost savings.

Further, of that 3%, about 0.1% goes to Visa, the rest goes to the issuing bank and covers the cost of rewards programs and loan origination. Generally speaking between 1 and 2% of that will be rebated to the buyer.

For the remaining 0.9-1.9%, customers get benefits like insurance and the ability to issue chargebacks.

In Europe, debit interchange is capped at 0.2% and credit at 0.3%, and they just don't have insurance or rewards.

As it stands today if you wanted to transact in crypto, not only will you pay the $30 fee, you'll also be paying the mark-up for credit acceptance.

> As it stands today if you wanted to transact in crypto, not only will you pay the $30 fee,

Only bitcoin and ethereum have fees in this range. Other cryptocurrencies do not.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...

Indeed, and thank you for sharing the link, I've been looking at crypto transaction fees one-off so it's nice to have them overlaid.

I know how credit cards work. I'm saying that Ethereum fees could be priced in the same way and you'd also never notice them because they'd get aggregated over every purchase. I realize this isn't a realistic scenario, but I think it's ignoring a monopoly type situation to accept that credit cards can price their costs in and other types of transactions cannot.

its "priced in"

I'm curious where the $37 number comes from? I just did a quick search and came up with $13.64 for a "high priority" transaction (higher than normal fee to get included in a block sooner)[0]. It's still high, but not $37 high.

[0] https://mempool.space/

I got that from here: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Of course the "average" might be more bytes than buying a pack of gum but the argument still holds that the transaction costs are prohibitive for general commerce.

Why would you need to wait for the transaction to confirm? That’s not how bitcoin payments work.

That's because cryptocurrencies are typically much better than conventional currencies for speculation and crime. Some "coins" are also usable as standard payment methods, but they're either on-par with conventional banking or just slightly better, not enough to make them the preferred choice for mundane transactions. The stigma also doesn't help.

Speculation is a huge use case. Bitcoin will never be practical for day to day transactions but it may be for a settlement layer - certainly Ethereum is proving that out right now. A few minute settlement time is a huge advantage over what clearing houses offer. The immutability of the block chain somewhat less so, but if you introduce third party trust and can settle things off chain in case of a dispute, well, I for once do see a practical use of crypto beyond black market transactions and speculation.

Well, probably the settlement layer won't be BTC per se, but the incoming fork by the US government.

When your economy revolves around an entity armed to the teeth you don't need consensus.

These are a bit random. The church has many perceptions similar to this one.

Deflationary currencies encourage savings. The more the deflation the more the savings. Inflationary currency encourages consumerism. The more the inflation the more rapid spending. Each have their pluses and minuses.

The USD is an inflationary currency and Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. Right now Bitcoin is extremely deflationary and so there is extreme savings, but that is not sustainable indefinitely. Whether it becomes more popular to spend Bitcoin after the value levels out remains to be seen, but deflationary Bitcoin will always tend to encourage savings more than inflationary competitors like the USD.

Crime is just a delineation about who's allowed to exploit people for money.

It's the exploitation that's bad whether it takes the form of scams or profits

Careful there, you're getting awfully close to describing the tax man.

In a lot of cases I would say that's true. US taxes largely go to funding unnecessary military ventures and preparedness, not actually helping the tax payers

This is a hot take. How does violence fit into this model?

If someone is killed in a crime of passion, where's the monetary exploitation?

Ransomware literally would not be possible it today's world without cryptocurrency. I think that's plenty reason enough to blame crypto.

economical crisis wouldn't exist without money, plenty of reason to blame money

We do hold banks accountable for money laundering.

Just because they figured out a technologically advanced way to do it doesn't mean it becomes ok.

and banks get a slap on the wrist and do it again. it's not technology, it's friends in high places

Not so fast, maybe he has a point. We should also fine the dollar in Bitcoin for all illegal transactions using the dollar as currency.

What else does cryptocurrency currently enable to the same degree (or close to) as crime? Speculative investment? We have the stock market for that. Pyramid schemes? Got plenty of thost. Burning through tons of energy for nothing but economic gain? Plenty of that around already. Store of value? Precious metals say hello.

Seriously, I can't think of a single positive use case of crypto currency. So while it can be used for some things, it seems to me that the only concrete use case that is already happening, is crime.

Vechain is a good example, but there are many. Do your own research if you can manage to shed your bias

Thwarting the immoral "drug war" seems like a pretty good use case.

> No, money will always be used for crime as long as money and crime exists.

This seems to fly in the face of the facts. Namely, that ransomware was virtually impossible to conduct before digital currency, due to the traceability of electronic money, and all current ransomware uses cryptocurrency rather than any other form of payment.

And I would argue that the need for crime is the problem. You seem to happily skip this step as if crime is a given. Take away the need for crime, solve the problem.

The answer is to get rid of poverty and unequal opportunities.

I’m not saying it’s easy. But if you’re dissecting a problem, at least present all the pieces.

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