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I find you utterly un-compelling.

And I say that as someone who has literally spent hundreds of bitcoin at one of the ONLY points in bitcoin's history when it was primarily used as a genuine medium of exchange (silk road).

Simple example - show me a method of handling reconciliation of fraud/contract dispute for bitcoin that doesn't fall back on the legal systems of those government systems you're so happy to rail against. (hint - there is NONE).

You know what those governments absolutely won't do? Incur costs upon themselves to mediate exchanges in a foreign currency. They will either ban it (china) or add back all those things you seem to think bitcoin will solve (funds freezing, required intermediaries, identity & reporting, sanctions) that make those costs predictable and acceptable (us).

What do you mean only point in it's history? I agree that bitcoin is mostly good for drugs but it's still being used for that as we speak. Some markets are starting to only take Monero, sure, but you can still get around with just BTC. Silk road wasn't the last dn market or even the best, not even close.

The primary use is now speculation - full stop.

The distinction between store of value and speculation is rather fuzzy IMO.

Is putting money into gold for savings (because an actual savings bank account currently not only loses money in real but even in nominal terms) speculation as well?

Speculation: "investment in stocks, property, etc. in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss." Buying bitcoins seems to match the definition.

You can buy gold as an inflationary hedge, but I don't think people would do that with bitcoin.

How does a bank account lose money in nominal terms? You get paid interest

It depends on where you live. In some countries it's common for monthly fees to exceed the interest you get paid. My corporate bank account ended up in the hands of a colleciton agency that way!

Have you heard of negative interest rates? This is so real that it is real.

Also real: the wild "insanity" that is the picture painted by the writer of this Harper's piece is also exactly the same "insanity" that is present in, well, everything that involves the US dollar.

Money is so tenuous worldwide at this stage that entire central bank policy is designed so that you won't want to keep it anyway. You must spend! We really are jacked directly into the machine. It's pretty wild if you compare it to just a blip ago, historically.

I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you?

As I said in the last post I linked, Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars a year in cross-border remittances, largely to family members in Venezuela; this suggests that it's keeping several million people alive. I hear there are still darknet markets around, too. So there are current uses as a genuine medium of exchange that are very significant.

Do they amount to its primary use? I don't know. I suspect Bitcoin's primary use right now is speculation, and I wish that would settle down, because I'd really appreciate it if the money I get paid in would retain roughly the same value for weeks at a time. But perhaps the primary use of US$100 bills is cocaine trafficking; if so, what does it matter to people who are using them for other things? If the primary use of oxygen were feeding pathogenic bacteria, would you stop using oxygen?

I don't think it's a problem that Bitcoin doesn't contain its own fraud or contract dispute resolution mechanisms. Neither do gold, silver, copper, or greenbacks, and they work pretty well as currencies. Last time I had a dispute about a Bitcoin transaction, I resolved it by negotiating with the person I was disputing with to find a mutually agreeable settlement, which took about an hour; failing that, theoretically I could have resorted to talking to their friends, the Mafia, or, yes, the police, but probably I would have just swallowed my losses and not done business with them again. (In theory I could also have resorted to individual violence, too, which is probably the most common dispute resolution mechanism after simple negotiation.)

You may or may not be aware of this, but commerce is enormously older than states are, perhaps by a factor of ten, and a great deal of it has been conducted throughout history outside the aegis of any shared authority to whom disputes could plausibly be referred. It's true that a good dispute resolution mechanism reduces the risks of commerce, but commerce is often still worthwhile without it. Ask anybody who's worked under the table, been an illegal immigrant, rented a room illegally, or bought drugs on the street.

I'm not railing against government systems in this thread. They have their good points and their bad points. Fundamentally, though, I think history has proven out Lord Acton's maxim that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; and, because I have seen the devastation corrupt governments can wreak, I do not think that governments should have absolute power.

I especially do not think the US government should have absolute power over Russians, or that the Chinese government should have absolute power over Americans; the history of such arrangements is replete with avoidable famines and intentional genocides.

> I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you?

No - not really. The point of them wasn't to hold them with an expectation that they would become unreasonably valuable (speculation). The point of them was to make an exchange for a good that was otherwise hard to acquire (in this case - weed, before legalization).

You'll notice that's not something most of you "crypto advocates" ever actually do. You know, the sole purpose of a currency - exchanging it for goods and services. Usually you treat it purely as a speculative asset, to be exchanged for another currency that actually can be traded for goods and services.

> Neither do gold, silver, copper, or greenbacks, and they work pretty well as currencies.

Of fucking course they do - the government taxes exchanges on them at unreasonably high rates (gold has a 28% long term capital gains tax, vs the normal 15-20%.) precisely because they understand that they're used as value stores (proxies for currency).

And that's precisely my point, really - the government WILL NOT protect you from fraud in the crypto space if it doesn't have a way to regulate and mediate the costs of doing so (such as tax derived income from the exchange). In which case - all of your above points become moot, because now you're right back to asking the government to enforce your contract or bill of sale. Remind me again how crypto is going to protect me from that government...?

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edit - if you're actually interested, you can read more of my thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330879&p=2#29331460

I was there when MTGox blew up, I'm acutely aware of the risks of fraud in this space, outside of the current pump and dump fraud that's frankly rampant in the crypto world. Your finance 2.0 looks a whole lot like cooked books and bankers who run away with the cash once they have it, with an unhealthy dose of gambling tossed on top - it's not pretty.

> Of fucking course [gold, silver, copper, and greenbacks work pretty well as currencies] - the government taxes exchanges on them at unreasonably high rates (gold has a 28% long term capital gains tax, vs the normal 15-20%.)

Gold, silver, and copper have worked pretty well as currencies for 2700 years under a variety of taxation schemes, of which by far the most common was "no taxation", which I believe is the case here. Exchanges of greenbacks are not taxed at unreasonably high rates anywhere I know of. Moreover, it isn't clear how taxing the exchange of capital gains on certain commodities at an unreasonably high rate would help it function as a currency; perhaps you mean that it stabilizes their value? But the value of the metals we're talking about is primarily determined by the world market.

It is of course correct that some governments will refuse to referee disputes without imposing what you describe as "unreasonably high" taxes. Historically, though, many governments have successfully resolved disputes without imposing confiscatory taxes or demanding far-reaching extrajudicial powers against people outside their jurisdiction, and we have every reason to believe that such governments will continue to exist, even if you don't have the luck of having one yourself.

You can always emigrate, you know. But possibly not if you need your government's permission to take your savings with you.

I agree with you about the risks of fraud and the dismaying ubiquity of pump-and-dump scams, and I agree that if you do not hold your bitcoins yourself they are just as vulnerable as if you left them in a bank—a lesson missed by most current "crypto advocates," who keep their coins in their Binance accounts. I am sorry to hear about your loss to the MtGox theft.

Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.

In exchange for that taxation, you can write a contract that says "I will give you X gold for Y dollars" and expect the government to back that contract. It will provide legal avenues for you to use the services they have available to recoup funds in the event of fraud (up to and including physical force and imprisonment, which almost all governments keep a tight monopoly on). They tax you because providing those services incurs a cost, and they need a way to continue offering them. Historically, you could make exchanges in those assets, but there was often zero governmental protection for doing so (sometimes things considered morally harmful were punished by the government, such as theft, but they certainly wouldn't agree to do things like enforce contract disputes for free - at best you get a legal wager [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compurgation] where you both pay up front to be heard. At other times courts were reserved to disputes above a certain value, or lower classes were prohibited from making a legally valid contract in the first place, precisely because enforcement was expensive)

If bitcoin makes that taxation impossible (or even unreasonably difficult), and it's possible to freely trade without recourse (no freezing, no transaction reversal, no monetary control at all) two options are present:

1) Stop resolving disputes for bitcoin (ex: China).

2) Add taxation, while adding back forms of control to make the costs reasonable and predictable, to match taxes.

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Long point short - Sure, 2700 years ago you could trade shiny metal for things without taxes, but it was "at your own risk", under a governmental structure that had more leeway for you enforcing it yourself (no prohibition or monopoly on violence and imprisonment). Those are not the conditions we find ourselves in today.

> Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.

I'm not sure if you've spent any time hanging around in the world of illegal immigrants, but in my family's circles, there _are_ contractors that are loose family friends of ours who _do_ take gold in order to perform services. Often the gold is repurposed into jewellery or otherwise sold to other immigrant-owned businesses. Eventually someone in the immigrant network can wash the gold clean. Members of our extended family fled civil war by holding jewellery on their person , and there are stories of others who melted their jewellery down and travelled with it, and used these to fund their lives in Western nations they emigrated to. Now that my family's country has politically stabilized this is a lot rarer and as such I don't know, at least in our extended network, anyone who still washes gold clean.

Sure - and this is where there is marginal use for value stores like this, but two thoughts

1. You are dealing with "family friends" who have a clear social connection (and reputation!), helping to mitigate the risk that they simply run off - not the case for sending digital coins to a person you've never met.

2. You are in a situation where you're choosing to avoid government enforcement because of legality issues (in this case, immigration status). This is also why bitcoin worked for dark markets - No one cared that the government wasn't going to enforce your bitcoin transaction, because that lack of enforcement was already a given based on the goods being traded (illegal/black market items)

In both of these cases - basically any asset can fill that role. Shiny metal, food, expensive clothing, jewelry, guns, drugs etc. Bitcoin is appealing for basically one reason alone - it weighs nothing (and as a side effect, can be digitally transferred). Since usually the limiting factor in barter is literally how much weight in goods you can drag away.

The problem, and this is genuinely where I become annoyed, is that the speculation the above poster is so happy about actually degrades the usefulness of bitcoin in this space. No one wants to hold an asset that might lose 25% of its value over night, and no one wants to spend a currency that might gain 25% of its value over night either. This run of "get rich quick" fools and "pump and dump" fan boys have been a plague on the usefulness of digital coins since people realized bitcoin shot up in price any time the media mentioned it, way back in 2012. Then they harp on and on about how digital coins are the next finance, without understanding the current system, because their incentives aren't aligned with actually using the thing as a currency, they're entirely aligned with getting more suckers on board in their speculation scam.

So yes - if you're in the (very small) minority of folks who either won't or can't use governmental recourse anyways - there was at one point in time some usefulness for bitcoin. But unless you're planning on buying drugs or guns online, my current advice is to stick with gold.

Please support your local union artisanal farm-to-bong marijuana farmers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2CU1cdTlQE

> I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you?

I don’t know if you realize just how disturbing and manipulative this sounds.

I definitely didn't think to read it as disturbing and manipulative. What do you think I'm trying to manipulate him to do? Not blow a literal fortune on smoking weed? It's too late for that, I think. He says he spent hundreds of Bitcoins buying weed; at today's prices, a hundred Bitcoins are US$3.8 million. If he'd smoked one third less weed and just kept the other third of the Bitcoins (in his own wallet, not MtGox's!) he'd be a multimillionaire. Who knows, maybe he's a multimillionaire anyway and that's why he doesn't regret it?

In that case, I'd like to manipulate everybody: Save a reasonable percentage of your earnings! Invest a modest percentage of your current consumption in a diversified portfolio of assets with a reasonable expectation of future returns! Be aware that you may become disabled or encounter other serious economic difficulties, and a little frugality today may produce enormous payoffs down the road! Be prudent and don't bet heavily on any single asset class! I'll love you if you do! Your parents would be disappointed if you failed at this!

What other manipulative stratagems can I use to get people to be wiser and more responsible?

>Simple example - show me a method of handling reconciliation of fraud/contract dispute for bitcoin that doesn't fall back on the legal systems of those government systems you're so happy to rail against.

There are some people who would much rather trust the government with total control over their money, and there are some people who would much rather take responsibility for their money even if that means the government isn't there to swoop in and save them if they are foolish enough to be swindled or entrust money to someone who defrauds them. In a free society, people would be able to choose whether to incur the risks associated with the government or the risks associated with total control over their own finances. It is very telling that adherents for government control seek to eliminate this choice at the point of a gun.

The fraud/contract mechanism that I remember seeing proposed years ago was always escrow (which BTC at least supports) and a third party arbiter.

Yes - this is exactly what the silk road did. A buyer would place enough coins into escrow with the silk road to prove he had the funds available to make the purchase, the seller would ship the goods, after receiving the goods, the buyer would unlock the coins from escrow and they would be given to the seller.

The problem here, is that this effectively makes the silk road (drumroll...) a traditional bank. With the monetary controls and downsides that the folks trying to speculate on bitcoin claim they don't want. (The can freeze funds, reverse transactions, run away with your coins, etc)

Further, since traditional mining is out of reach for most folks - there's no real way to avoid having to buy through an intermediary. So when you hear folks saying "Not your wallet, not your coins" ask them how they managed to get their coins in the first place, and how they avoided ever trusting an intermediary with their coins during that process (unless they literally mined them themselves, not as a pool, they're bullshitting you - they trusted an intermediary, and fraud was absolutely a possibility)

I think my real point here (admittedly long winded) is that a large reason the modern banking system functions the way it does is that they've essentially been asked to handle fraud and dispute reconciliation in a world where you're not allowed to resort to rote physical violence yourself. Unfortunately, to do that they require all sorts of monetary controls (The same controls coin enthusiasts claim to hate). But those same enthusiasts don't actually have a functional solution for handling reconciliation in instances where a dispute actually occurs, outside of falling back on the legal system of a government.

Some of them seem to have a mental fantasy of hiring assassins or threatening folks with either hacking or some other "dire" threat, but it's mostly bullshit - when fraud happens they run squealing to the government or they eat the loss. These folks are like a strange variation of the "prepper" crowd - they wish the world worked like it did thousands of years ago where blunt force solved problems.

Thinking escrow services make them a central bank means you're misunderstanding a lot of things. "Central banks" control currency printing, which silk road never did. The entire point of BTC is that being algorithmically controlled. I suspect you just mean traditional banks where people have their checking and savings accounts. But you're still mistaken. Having an arbiter for the money involved in one transaction does not mean you can have all of your funds frozen. At worst you can have a bad arbiter that awards the money from one transaction unfairly. They also absolutely can not "reverse transactions" if you are paying with a transfer on chain. I think you're mixing up "escrow" where a website requires you send them your BTC and they transfer your BTC to someone else for you by moving numbers in a SQL table with actual on chain transactions. With on chain escrow the arbiter can never get the funds, only forward them or send them back.

But can you do it without going to jail when sanctions or similar are in place against you? Technically, you can, but you face the same consequences if you were able to get a wire or SEPA transaction through. That's the point. The tech doesn't change the policy or the law. You still go to jail or your country gets shelled. Miners get chased out of countries.

Russia is reportedly exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT. That does not bode well for crypto when it becomes a weapon of a an enemy combatant state.

(obligatory xkcd about getting beaten with a wrench for your private key here)

Generally when "[economic] sanctions or similar are in place against you" it's because the people who imposed the sanctions are physically unable to jail you. Or beat you with a wrench.

The tech doesn't change the policy or the law, but it does change their consequences in the real world. Fortunately it is not yet the case that the US shells every country whose citizens do business with entities it imposes sanctions on, although the US does shell a lot of countries, and it can be challenging to identify even which country a Bitcoin transaction originates from.

What's your source for "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT"? I assume you mean cryptocurrencies of some kind, because obviously SWIFT, СПФС, and CIPS all use cryptography, so that would be too obvious to mention. Right now I think Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with enough trading volume to handle Russia's foreign exchange needs; I don't think that's likely to happen in the next two years, though, if it ever happens at all.

If it did happen, though, it would put an end to the concerns that Bitcoin could collapse at any moment like a Ponzi scheme.

> What's your source for "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers if they get knocked off of SWIFT"? I assume you mean cryptocurrencies of some kind, because obviously SWIFT, СПФС, and CIPS all use cryptography, so that would be too obvious to mention. Right now I think Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with enough trading volume to handle Russia's foreign exchange needs.

EDIT: If you're looking for a press release from the Kremlin, no, I'm unlikely to be able to get something official from Vlad, only public news sources.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/business/russia-sanctions...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/russia-bi...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-could-bypass-president...

None of these substantiate the claim that "Russia is exploring crypto for transfers"; they just point out, as I did above, that people outside Russia say Russians could hypothetically use cryptocurrencies for transfers despite US sanctions. None of them even propose that the Russian government use cryptocurrencies for its own foreign trade, and none of them claim to have any Russian sources at all, whether officials or leaks or civilians. The Cointelegraph article claims that Maduro proposed doing this in the past (for Venezuela) and that Iranians raising money for flood relief have actually done so.

Russia doesn't need to resort to Bitcoin, when they can easily use their own SWIFT alternative or China's. China is conveniently friendly with Russia these days, is rapidly expanding CIPS, and would likely welcome the chance to expand it even more.

The existence of these alternatives is one reason Russia probably won't be banned from SWIFT in the first place.

Archive from The Economist: https://archive.is/CHiiI

It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds. Presumably for Russia to use СПФС or CIPS other countries (or banks?) have to use it too, otherwise they can only pay themselves.

Are there any downsides to making a payment through СПФС rather than SWIFT? For example, are you revealing information to the ФСБ, or exposing yourself to counterparty risk from the Russian government, or making it possible for the Russian government to cut you off from your payees if they want to level economic sanctions against you? A potential upside of Bitcoin in this sort of situation is that it's neutral: nobody can cut off your access to it, everybody can see your transactions (but without names and places), and you're only exposed to counterparty risk for the few minutes until your transaction is confirmed.

But, again, I don't think that'll happen in the next couple of years, and possibly never.

I always found it sickly charming that they call that method of hacking "rubber-hose cryptanalysis"

If Russia pour a trillion into crypto it would boost cryto like crazy.

Governments are buying oil and other products from Russia and need a way pay them. Russian banks will move money outside of swift. Swift just makes it easier.

But, isn't standard Bitcoin completely traceable, once you move funds out of your wallet to fiat? Can't they track you down retroactively after you make that one transaction?

Tracking you down retroactively is very different from freezing your bank account so you miss your rent payment. Also, generally, no, fiat-currency cash transactions are not completely traceable, and in practice there doesn't seem to be a Bitcoin-oriented equivalent of https://cdn.occrp.org/projects/suisse-secrets-interactive/, at any rate not yet.

GNU Taler electronic scrip[0] caught my eye awhile back.

It's supposedly anonymous to the payer, but traceable to the payee. The idea being to provide privacy for consumers, while allowing governments traceability for tax purposes. It acts like a gift card and reminds me of the Chiemgauer[1], a very interesting regional scrip that traces back to Freigeld[2].

While GNU Taler seems to be focused on anonymous consumption, the Chiemgauer is a balanced electronic medium of exchange. It doesn't have the privacy aspect of the Taler, as far as I know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Taler

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld

I doubt Bitcoin will help you when an authoritarian government targets you specifically

https://xkcd.com/538/

Money is the flow of utility (1st derivative). Flow of money is 2nd derivative.

The uses you indicate are probably 10% of the use case, the remaining 90% is money laundering.

Why do you think that it is a 10-90 split like that? I think it's 90-10 the other way. I have no proof but it sounds like you don't either.

I don't think your derivatives are correct.

I'm curious where you get the 90% estimate? In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30446703 I looked at the Chainalysis study at https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor... (use Reader Mode), in which they found that Russian "illicit and risky" businesses including money laundering accounted for 0.004% of (on-chain) Bitcoin transaction volume. (They included even coins that had been through mixers in their "risky" category, so this is presumably a vast overestimate.)

Where do you think all this money laundering is happening geographically, and why do you think there's so much of it?

Even if it were 90%, I'm not sure why the 10% of users using Bitcoin to do things like keep their savings from being frozen should care about that other 90%. Do you want them to sacrifice themselves and their families to reduce the liquidity available for money laundering by 10%? If 90% of oxygen is consumed by pathogenic bacteria, should you stop consuming oxygen?