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Comment by mccorrinall | Hacker News Reader

I pay my servers at vultr.com, my domains on porkbun.com and my drugs on $market with bitcoin :)

But all three of them also accept USD or your local currency. So the use case remains... evading the authorities? That's not a compelling use case for the general population.

Is everyone who is using cash also evading authorities? Unfortunately most internet companies don’t accept cash, therefore I’m trying to use something which gets as close as possible to cash in regard to its privacy aspects. I just don’t want to use shitty paypal which locks money of vendors for 180 days, or mastercard who randomly allege companies of child porn without providing any evidence (see pornhub).

I don’t like these companies and will try to not use them at all. Yes, I’m paying a price for it, but imo it’s worth it.

I can also flip my burgers with my flipflop. I was asking for a useful usecase.

I love this comparison, similar to the “if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike”

Paying bills isn’t a useful usecase?

Not for the extremely limited subset of bills, which you can pay.

Overall, no it isn't.

Why do you need BTC to do any of that?

I don’t need to do that. But it’s an accepted currency, so why shouldn’t I use it when it’s offered?

Well, purportedly BTC is a high-yield investment asset, so paying for things in it instead of regular money, which is purportedly a negative yield (e.g inflation) asset, makes way less financial sense.

Though this does highlight one of the things that's never made sense to me about this entire ecosystem. Something that's a high-yield asset is a terrible currency because you're basically punishing your future self for spending it on mundane stuff.

While other treat bitcoin as an investment, I treat it as a way to send money without getting censored and without supporting PayPal and VISA/MasterCard. It’s an idealistic thing (which is probably the reason why I only pay products worth 100-200$/month in BTC. I obviously don’t pay my rent, my car etc in BTC). For me it’s just an alternative to cash, which I also use for smaller purchases — cash is „gelebte Freiheit“.

Honestly, I’d also prefer to use GNU Taler instead of bitcoin, but unfortunately GNU Taler never gained any traction.

Never liked the one way privacy of it, and it’s not a coin. It also adds nothing you don’t get already in the underlying cryptocurrencies.

It’s a payment protocol for arbitrary assets. You can pay in Bitcoin via Taler. I don’t think it will gain traction. The best payment protocol for Bitcoin today is Lightning Network, and is as open, and more sophisticated than GNU Taler ever was.

Yes, I ack that BTC is pubkeyhash and scripthash pseudononymous are not private.

High Yield? No way. Bitcoin can only be mined. It returns nothing. It’s a boring rock that can be transmitted over a communication channel. You have the same number of Bitcoins today, next half, next generation (provided you don’t lend or sell them).

Other PoS shitcoins could be considered high yield, in fact the yield is algorithmic and is independent of market value (which is an odd concept, as other reg high yield products will return capital explicitly to satisfy a yield.)

Taken further, yield may well be the “scam”. Bitcoin provides none of this.

The conversation is about problems that BTC solves.

I do all of those things with actual money.

If you buy drugs on the darknet with USD you're playing a dangerous game

This is equally true of buying drugs on the darknet using BTC.

If you understand how bitcoin works, you shouldn’t really worry. You can easily get rid of tainted coins.

hypothetically, where does one find latest markets?

/r/onions

https://dark.fail/

the same place undercover agents find them

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