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I used to feel this way until visa/master pulled that project-2025-mandated stunt on nsfw games.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/03/mastercard-denies-pressuri...
so, "positive [economic] value [for some]" and "negative [social] value on net" are not mutually exclusive.
I think the bigger problem is not people selling naughty things. It's the absolutely reckless approach governments (and one government in particular) have taken when we give them the lever and dials that control the financial system. The modern fiat financial system is designed to transfer wealth from the least powerful to the most powerful, nothing more and nothing less.
These will often refuse or vastly over charge perfectly legal business that they have a "moral" objection to. This is by design.
Dammed if you do, and dammed if you dont.
I don’t know if crypto is the solution, but watching even supposedly technologically literate places like HN largely cheer for cashless societies where every transaction is monitored and gatekept, while limits continue to be dialed downwards is all anyone needs to see to realize working within the system is a plan for failure.
Transacting money is not a crime, it’s simply a lazy way to fight it. It enables enforcement of trivial policies and more or less removes a key pillar of human freedom.
One of those things actually works, period.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not going to lead to a better system overall. It may fix a few of the specific problems with the current system, but it introduces enough other problems that it becomes, at best, a wash.
And in practice, it's abundantly clear that cryptocurrency does not work. People don't want it. The only reason it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity now is because Trump, under the influence of various cryptocurrency scammers (note: this is not me saying "all cryptocurrency is a scam"; this is me saying "the specific people influencing Trump on this are scammers"), has been promoting it in order to feed their scams.
Yes, antitrust enforcement in the US is a joke right now. It was actually ramping up to be pretty darn good under Biden. Now it's not, and we have several other problems to solve before we're going to be able to get to it.
None of that makes cryptocurrency a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency with proper antitrust controls. Frankly, it's not even a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency without proper antitrust controls.
Fiat money, unlike crypto, have lots of non-criminal uses.
Given a government reflecting the will of the people, anything you need crypto for is de facto antisocial behavior
i think it's nice to have a plan B for when the governments idea of criminal doesn't line up with my own so much
The only application I can even think of where cryptocurrency is actually better than fiat is ransomware. Actually I suppose any kind of ransom payment might benefit from using crypto, as there's no risky physical cash handover for police to intercept. Seems like it could be equally useful for kidnappers as ransomware hackers.
But I can't think of single non-ransom transaction where fiat isn't better than crypto. Legal or otherwise.
For example when buying illicit substances, I don't see why I would want to pay extra to make the transaction traceable and public?
You don’t think they’ll declare crypto illegal? Or owning it? Or using it?
... like now?
Crypto has uniquely allowed the huge uptick in ransomware.
Before they had to figure out some way to get paid using the banking system without getting caught. These days maybe they would be asking for $50 million in iTunes gift cards, I don’t know. But it was a hurdle.
Once Cryptocurrencies started to get well known ransomware embraced it incredibly strongly. A far far more anonymous payment method that any random company or person could pay through?
Seriously. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9e72ec_52b812bb082b4fdebd...
You think that’s just a coincidence? Crypto is a huge driver for the ransomware industry.
https://jdsupra-html-images.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/85dd2...
BC was very esoteric in 2010 or 2012. I imagine it would have been impossible for average businesses to actually get the crypto to pay with.
By ~2016 that was far easier for your average joe.
In comparison, it’s estimated that Americans spend about $10T per year. I don’t have the numbers worldwide but America is a big piece of the cake.
So, speculation is vastly higher than regular spending, even for “regular money”.
in the US, banks will question you if you try to withdraw your own cash from your own bank account past a certain limit set decades ago and never adjusted while the dollar continues to lose value.