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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

The value proposition was uncensorability, irreversibility, non-inflationary nature, and permissionless nature.

It's a tool that can be used for good or evil, just like the personal automobile, which was also abused in early years for malicious ends - just as telephony, the internet, and a number of other technologies were.

Criminals are early adopters of new & emerging technologies, that doesn't make those technologies inherently evil.

Also, why lump drug transactions in with weapons / CSAM / cc fraud / assassinations? Most drug buyers are not hurting anyone.

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> Also, why lump drug transactions in with weapons / CSAM / cc fraud / assassinations? Most drug buyers are not hurting anyone.

The marketplace for all of the above (except assassination) was the same - Silk Road. I remember seeing different sections for weapons, credit cards, fake ids and drugs, but I don't remember seeing a section for CSAM unless it was masquerading as something else.

That's a fair point. But what was on that platform was there because it was illegal, not necessarily immoral (drugs for responsible, personal consumption). I am simply contesting the use of drug transactions (especially small ones for personal use) as an example of an undesirable use case of a new technology.

The drug trade is definitely culpable for violence and human misery. Unless you're perhaps talking exclusively about psychedelics (and even that isn't squeaky clean, but production and distribution is less violent due to the origin and effort required in distribution), the users while not directly responsible, are absolutely funding some grotesque stuff behind the scenes that they usually brush under the rug.

None of this means that the war on drugs etc was justified or that its implementation did not have serious flaws, just that the drug trade isn't a manufacturer of purely victimless crimes.

> The value proposition was uncensorability, irreversibility, non-inflationary nature, and permissionless nature.

This boils down to two things, really: 1. To skirt the law (aka regulatory arbitrage) and 2. Act as a techno-libertarian “sound money” experiment.

Ghost guns can be used for good. But it’d be pretty silly to suggest that criminals use them because they’re early adopters. Criminals use them because they’re criminals. Sometimes the laws they’re breaking are unjust—but these are just tools for breaking the law.

And just because you can use crypto to buy things legally, there’s virtually no reason to do so, like taking a ghost gun to your local firing range.

I'd disagree on your first point. A critical component of systems that should skirt the law would be untraceability. A cryptocurrency like Monero or Zcash has this property (or attempts to, at least), and they are much stronger candidates for that use case.

Uncensorability is a desireable property for legal adult content producers, who are locked out of many payment platforms despite operating entirely within the law.

Irreversibility is a desireable property for merchants, who are the ones left holding the back when chargeback fraud occurs.

Permissionless nature is a desireable property for those at risk of discrimination from traditional financial institutions. While rare in the developed world for law-abiding customers, there are plenty of countries where people of certain races, religions, and ethnic groups are denied access to financial resources like a bank account because of such factors.

While these traits may be attractive to criminals, especially ransomware authors, they aren't only attractive to criminals, and all of them find demand in law-abiding users, as detailed above.

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