Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

And what could be better for "those living under corrupt regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?

Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions conducted in 2021

https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...

A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say.

You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.

The source for this article is a "study" from Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%.

Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers.

[0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/

You can't assume gift cards are all money laundering. What an absurdly inflammatory and baseless allegation.

The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

This provides examples of phenomena that are very similar to other phenomena known to possess particular properties, and argues you don't need new evidence to deduce that there is a significant chance that the example phenomena share the same properties as the similar phenomena.

This is not congruent with the gift card example. There is no comparable product that is known to be used in the majority of cases for money laundering.

That’s the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just surviving, because they don’t have a local reliable currency.

Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?

I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.

It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com