Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bilal_io | Hacker News Reader

> Dorsey is a big Bitcoin fan, so that’s the kind of utility he appreciates.

This sounds disingenuous. Not every fan of Bitcoin supports fraud, drug trafficking.. etc. The dollar is used for such bad activities, should we label everyone that loves the dollar as a supporter of fraud and drugs?

View on HN

I would be interested in the percentage of

1. Bitcoin (crypto) users who (only) have BC because they hate fiat money

2. Users who have BC because they need it for illegal gains

3. Opportunistic investors

4. Web3ers

I have the unsubstantiated feeling that 1 is overstated.

5. People for whom fiat money is impractical for one or more reasons

This category is way larger than people in well-banked Western circles realise. Bitcoin (crypto) is one of the easiest ways for people affected by capital controls or sanctions (on the financial institutions they use, or the country they were unlucky enough to be born in) to freely move their (legally earned, and taxed) money across borders.

Since one of the countries with strict capital controls is China, and one of the countries affected by sanctions is Russia, the scale of this usage of crypto is huge.

[citation needed]

Is sanctions-evasion a good thing?

Russia is currently fighting a war of aggression, applying controls on the flow of money in or out of there is one way in which the war machine can be starved.

I'm no expert, but restricting the flow of goods seems both necessary and sufficient. The war machine doesn't run on money.

A state can always find a way to hide the transactions, on the other hand.

> The war machine doesn't run on money.

I think it might, particularly where the war machine has a partner willing to sell it arms.

The partner can sell arms on a loan. There's a million of possible arrangements.

Sure, but that’s going to be less likely if the buyer’s economy is slowly grinding to a halt.

A state can always find a way to hide the transactions, on the other hand

I think the risk of sanctions, means that while there are work arounds, the cost of those work arounds, and the restrictions on who will do business with you, dramatically increase the costs of certain goods.

So sure, the cash moves, but now you pay more. A lot more. Death by 1000 cuts, and all that...

Whether sanctions evasion is good depends principally on which side of the sanction line you fall.

"Aggression" is an objective measure. There is no subjectivity who starts a war and wo is in another country's territory. Those are observable facts.

And obviously Russia did not believe Ukraine to be a threat - or they would have not done this haphazard invasion with too little preparation and too few soldiers, so there is no excuse.

The world isn't as black and white as you paint it.

> 5. People for whom fiat money is impractical for one or more reasons

Did the bitcoiners forget about paper bills?

Both China and Russia have restrictions on taking paper money out of the country, which are much easier to enforce since there's a physical aspect.

The idea that some cryptocoin is used by some large but unseen group of people is often talked about but nobody presents the data that show that this group really exists. Is there some real data that shows that this large group actually exists or is it all speculation?

The vast majority of the cash changers in Istanbul have tether and BTC logos.

There’s a similar situation in Lebanon with BTC’s near ubiquity in remittances.

Just because it doesn’t impact your life doesn’t mean this use isn’t self evident elsewhere.

And a large number of cigarette shops and bodegas in the US have lottery tickets. Is there a clear reason why we assume it's for remittances and not for gambling? I know in South Asia for example most of it is indeed for degenerate gambling/"get rich overnight" schemes.

This ought to be a verifiable claim, thanks to Street View. I looked around the airport[0] and in[1] various[2] streets[3]. The images are from last year, but they don’t show cash changers with either tether or BTC logos. I did end up finding one[4] after searching through seven, although it is dedicated to cryptocurrencies (it was next to a cash exchange, it isn't one), and its website states this[5]:

> Is exchanging cryptocurrency legal in Turkey? Yes, it is legal to buy, sell or trade your crypto money as long as crypto money is not used to pay goods or services.

They also mention they only pay out in USD. That makes it sound like the only possible use is for a Russian to convert Rubles to BTC in their home country, exchange BTC with USD there, then go next door to exchange their USD with Lira. That is so heavily tied to sanctions that it can explain why actual cash exchanges don’t support cryptocurrencies.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9774298,28.820529,2a,75y,324...

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0080274,28.9761991,3a,15y,34...

[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0166738,28.9509347,3a,88.5y,...

[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0150099,28.9752954,3a,25.8y,...

[4]: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0086973,28.9713568,3a,60y,64...

[5]: https://nakitcoins.com/en

It’s how I used it. To donate to an Ukrainian streamer many years ago who couldn’t use PayPal and to transfer money easily to my then girlfriend in South Africa (though that got replaced by xe.com later). It was just far easier and cheaper than the alternatives.

Since the Bitcoin supply is capped, the price itself is data about it being used. At present, it will cost you $28,000 to obtain 1 Bitcoin from those of us who value it.

So these people want to avoid law, by avoiding paying taxes or fees of their capital. Which is precisely #2 from the parent poster - "Users who have BC because they need it for illegal gains".

I'm not assigning a moral value to this. I'm just commenting that law avoidance is law avoidance, even if you really really want or need to do it.

Tokens are useless in comparison to monay for almost any activity, except for law avoidance. For this task they are amazing.

internationally, 2 using cypto for illegal or unofficial means to transfer money is definitely more than 90%. The rest can share the remaining 10%.

Do you have a source for this figure? It doesn’t align with my experience.

This is a false dichotomy with 4 choices instead.

Category 1 was probably predominant during the early days of Bitcoin, so the old hands probably still hold onto to that notion.

point 4 is pretty much 3.1

All these categories are like about 5% each, the 80% is normal hard working people who don't like hard working — it is literally hard work! — and to whom crypto gives hope as a magic box in which one throws pennies and dollars come back. It's a bit creepy (the game is in fact zero/negative sum) but then gambling is not generally illegal.

Notably Block, the company in the article enables Bitcoin only, not crypto in general.

> the 80% is normal hard working people who don't like hard working

Another way to look at it is that 80% of Bitcoiners don’t like the value of their hard work to be continuously debased at a rate of 2-8+% year after year or being subjected to the whims of the Fed’s money printer which recently expanded the entire money supply by over 40% then claimed it wouldn’t drive inflation before claiming that inflation was temporary.

1. Bitcoin users who hate the fractional reserve model of banking with fiat or the ability for the Fed to print fiat arbitrarily is probably a majority

2. Hold Bitcoin for illegal uses, probably a small minority as there are better options such as Monero for illegal uses

3. Probably a majority of Bitcoiners are opportunistic investors. Why is that bad?

4. Web3ers, a minority of Bitcoiners. You are thinking of altcoins. (Yes Ordinals on Bitcoin are now a thing and are controversial in the Bitcoin community, but most Bitcoiners are hard money proponents who are not interested in NFTs)

I find these takes to be so disingenuous. The dollar is used in this manner in spite of legal and regulatory efforts. Bitcoin is used in this manner bc it was designed explicitly to be immune to these efforts.

I respect people who believe money should be uncensorable. But at least own that view and the implications, instead of all of this fiat whataboutism.

> I respect people who believe money should be uncensorable.

Why? That is just another way of saying moneyed interests should be above the rule of law. What could possibly be respectable about a view this odious?

I don’t think Chase freezing your account and refusing to tell you why counts as rule of law. I don’t see what’s so odious about coming up with a solution to move money that doesn’t involve financial institutions.

Sure, but that’s a problem with a specific bank, not a problem with fiat currency.

Solving bad customer service by creating a part of the economy meant to be outside of any accountability is a bad idea.

I agree. It's an extremist position to say that money should be outside the rules of society.

Let's take an experiment. Instead of "I should be free to send money to anyone anywhere", we'll replace money with a car.

"I should be free to drive my car anywhere, anytime". Sounds superficially like a reasonable proposition even? But in fact we have lots of rules that control who can drive a car, where, under what intoxication. There are driver's licenses, traffic signs, road police... Ultimately a judge will put you in jail if you exercise your freedom to drive outside of society's rules.

Now imagine someone using the pseudonym Suzuki Toyotamoto invents a car made out of floating jello with an engine that runs on nuclear waste. Many engineers will marvel at the ingenuity of the design. Some people start building their own jello blobs and driving them off-road without a license. The law says nothing explicitly about transportation inside floating jello. Eventually people take their floating jello vehicles to roads and get fined. (The jello moves barely at walking speed and drips radioactive sludge.) Outrage blows up in the floating jello community. Do the old rules apply to them? Will the whole world switch over to floating jello? (These questions may seem very important to those versed in the world of Suzuki Toyotamoto's floating jello, but most people just don't care and will happily keep using their regular cars instead of sitting in slime powered by radioactive waste.)

Because I appreciate different viewpoints. I may not agree with you but I can respect your opinion. What I don’t respect is people who draw false equivalencies and try to wiggle out of the consequences of their views.

I have no problem saying that cash should be uncesorable, as far as that goes.

But it as limits built in - it has to physically transfer hands, true anonymity is difficult, and is practically limited in its scale (moving and then using $1,000,000 in cash is logistically less practical than using a wire transfer).

Ie. it is mighty difficult to use cash for ransomware attacks, and it is not that simple to get paid in cash for a kidnapping (eg. the case of the guys who kidnapped a schoolbus, but while working out how to collect their ransom, the kids escaped.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com