Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

"main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services"

Nah. Far more people use crypto for speculation than for actually illicit purposes.

By far the largest portion of the market is bitcoin. Bitcoin is inherently traceable from the ledger and IRS is always looking for large tax fraud.

They can only speculate because of the value brought to it by illicit purposes.

I don’t think you could possibly know that.

I think you could probe into some truth about it by looking at the volumes being traded on exchanges and how much are in the exchange's wallets.

But that's true about fiat money, too. Far more fiat money gets traded on exchanges in a single day, than circulates the rest of the whole world's economy in a year. But I think you'd agree fiat money derives its value from the way you can go down to the corner store and buy stuff, not from the fact it's traded on exchanges, right?

My argument at this point was only that speculation probably triumphs illicit usage. Do you mean that speculation is built on top of illicit use for crypto? It maybe doesn't even matter what the fundamental beliefs are because it has a price, today, now.

Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com