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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.

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Where I live, you just go to the weed store and use USD.

Other drugs

Screw other drugs. I want to get some antibiotics without having to hear a lecture from 3 different doctors on why they won’t help me, even when they do.

Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.

People should not be self-prescribing and should listen to medical professionals. Sorry.

This in a thread about people getting illegal mind altering drugs…

That's a terrible idea. Bitcoin is completely public, you should use a privacy coin like Monero or ZCash.

Good luck converting Monero to fiat.

Binance has it.

Hm, interesting. Binance US does not.

I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).

With Monero you can't tell if coins are dirty so it doesn't matter.

Edit: I misread, you're talking about Monero -> Other coin swaps. My bad.

That may be true, but that's already a widely established industry that doesn't accept any other coin. I'm not offering any value judgements, just a statement of fact.

Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.

Wow, your weed dealer is a very multi-talented person.

That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.

Sushi bars be expensive.

Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it

It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01.

USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.

I can transfer thousands through zelle for free. Anything more then pennies I would consider expensive

You mean Monero thou. Why use bitcoin?

Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.

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