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Comment by splithalf | Hacker News Reader

Incentives matter. Bitcoin incentivizes certain types of criminal activity. As Bitcoin grows the negative externalities will become more pronounced. I truly don’t get the ethics of it. It is killing people, literally blood money as a great new technology. Bonus points for incentivizing climate destruction and burning of fossil fuels. I don’t understand the ethics of it.

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Wealth incentivizes that activity. Cryptocurrency is one easy way to transfer it, but it's not the "singular" reason ransomware is "possible."

> literally blood money

("Blood money" is an idiom, a colloquial metaphor. So a virtual currency is "literally" a metaphor? Ugh.)

Cryptocurrency has properties that make many kinds of criminal activity far easier than most other kinds of "wealth".

There's a reason that ransomware payments are now exclusively transferred through Bitcoin.

I am trying to say that Bitcoin has caused a change in the types of crimes that are being committed. It’s easily quantifiable. When I say it is blood money I mean that it is a way to pay for assassinations. Assassination markets are not new but Bitcoin as technology changes scale. Scale matters, regardless of what you believe.

The overwhelming majority of criminal commerce is conducted using traditional currencies such as U.S. Dollars or Euros. I truly don't get the ethics of it. It is killing people, literally blood money...

Replace "Bitcoin" with "Banks", in your argument.

Doesn't change anything

It only works if you ignore everything in the “pro” column. Try to imagine what a world without credit would look like. It’s a much poorer world.

Without consumerism and unneeded use of resources, you mean?

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