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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t think we’ve seen many good use cases. If people were being honest they would know that crypto was propped up initially by the drug trade and largely continues to be.

There might be a killer application down the road but investing in AI is so much more useful to humanity

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Don't forget moving huge quantities of money out of Saudi (after MBS took over), Russia, China (after Xi's anti-corruption efforts), Brazil, and India.

The price of BTC tracks with MBS and Xi's moves, too. Also correlates with housing prices in Vancouver, BC.

Money laundering, basically.

This claim was made often early on, without any supporting evidence. Because the network and userbase was smaller it was more plausible. Now it's substantially larger, and industry has developed within it.

So what's honest about claiming that it was or continues to be without any data?

Even if you decided to go out and attempt to gather this data (good luck), why does this matter? How much impact to the USD do you think there would be if all illegal drug trade stopped tomorrow?

There are a bunch of estimates on this, and I would say based on what we've seen lately with FTX that there is likely an even larger amount of fraud in the system than is known. Yes the USD is also used for illicit activity, but thats just cash, and we actively try to stop it.

Agree about FTX, but much of it was unsurprising to those paying attention, and that wasn't merely fraud about Crypto, that was an epic failure on the part of a few of the world's preeminent investors.

>but thats just cash

I'm not sure what you mean by this, can you elaborate? Every estimate I've found is very poor quality data, and I'm happy to pick apart any. It's similar to the energy use estimates which are equally poor and often miss vital distinctions.

its limited to a paper form of money, having an electronic currency like this opens a lot of doors for malfeasance

Some of the use cases of the last year:

- Working with companies everywhere in the world, as the bureaucracy of setting up the monetary relationships for, say, a Ukrainian immigrant residing in Poland willing to work for a US-based entity, is prohibitive;

- Targeted high-impact donations for Ukraine;

- Basically everything where the official way of doing is too slow or where there is too much red tape.

Right, and I think we've seen with all the crypto fraud that the red tape is there for a reason

There was little crypto fraud this year, other than the usual hacks. All the big stories were good old regular fraud by centralized companies that you also see in the fintech space. None of this was enabled by crypto. The problem is that most people don't understand the difference. It was just fraud, not crypto fraud. It's like saying that Theranos is "blood test fraud" and thus we should ban all blood testing. The fact that some founder scammed customers and investors has nothing to do with the market.

A lot of the fraud that happened in crypto this last year would have been prevented by regulators in the standard markets. Sometimes regulations are bad and unnecessary, but a lot of time they are there for a reason. The crypto crowd seems to have take the opinion that all regulation is bad

> high-impact donations for Ukraine

Crypto donations to Ukraine were a rounding error, and done seemingly more for the purposes of mounting another crypto stunt than actually helping people.

The post you answered to was too narrow; they should have written "regulatory arbitrage" that this would have encompassed your examples.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34478626#34479520

Drug trade and ransomware.

Crypto has huge externalities, even apart from people being scammed.

The good ol' "criminals use it"

Might as well ban e2e encryption. Or any security-enhancing measure that can protect individuals.

The difference is my mom uses e2e encryption to check her emails and sell jewelry on etsy.

She's never used BTC to buy anything. Outside of a few tech bros in SF or Austin no one is buying houses in BTC.

I don't know a single person on either coast or in any city that has used BTC to directly buy groceries; pretty much everyone I know has used e2e encryption to buy something off of Amazon.

Drug trade and ransoms... we should clearly ban cash and visa gift cards and any form of anonymous payment then, right?

Evidence?

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