Well, I use it, and I've spent some of it directly on newegg.ca in the past. It sucks they've ended up stubbornly not scaling up the block size as planned because it's increasingly less viable for direct purchases without high fees, only slow transfers are cheap.
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I hate exchanges, and don't trust them one bit. I was previously beginning a process of slowly getting ~1000 USD at a time turned into CAD and deposited into my bank account, and the exchange that I was using (Quadriga) finished an exit scam right before I sent them another 1k.
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I do think that it's the best way to receive donations in practice. People can send donations with incredibly low fees and you don't deal with chargebacks or disputes since payments can't be reversed. Can use btcpayserver.org if you want to hide how much you're receiving.
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my problems with Bi/tcoin are primarily political in nature (it's extremely destructive and also totally controlled in practice by like five guys who want to launder money from China, both bad long term outlook); I have used it extensively and know what it's capable of
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Bitcoin isn't very private at all even when not reusing addresses but I would like it far more if it was. I see support for laundering money as a necessary evil similar to criminals benefiting from end-to-end encrypted messaging. I do agree proof of work is a serious problem.
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Balance is opposite for communication vs exercising economic power. e2e comms proportionally benefit those without power more. Money laundering protocols proportionally benefit the extreme wealthy much more.
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Powerful people can afford to pay for a secure device like an iPhone, have people to tell them to use an app like Signal and it can definitely help them cover up crimes including money laundering, political corruption etc. Consider if politicians all used Signal with auto-delete.
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I think cash works quite well for money laundering, etc. right now. $1 million USD fits inside a normal briefcase or purse with $100 bills. Don't need electronic payments to bribe a politician, etc. and in practice they get bought off for tens of thousands of dollars anyway.
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The increasingly restrictive KYC / AML and other regulation is future looking, based on them foreseeing a world without cash, and it's already starting to be phased out by getting rid of the lower and upper denomination coins / bills, placing limits on purchase sizes and so on.
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They'll need to get rid of cash or make it a second class form of currency to implement the planned negative interest rates in recessions, so I don't think that's too far away. I also think seeing people's purchases is very privacy invasive, and can be worse than their messages.
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So, for example, what happens to someone that's gay in a country where that's persecuted or becomes persecuted in the future if their purchase history implies that's their sexuality or they supported activism tied to it in the past, etc. It applies to so many different things.
Personally, I see the whole way that fiat currency currently works as horrifying. Look at how they create and manage the money supply. They could simply distribute the created money as a basic income, but no, banks get it at near 0% interest to lend it to the poor for 20-30%.
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The poorer you are, the more interest you're going to pay, and the way it works is not even really fractional banking (which is effectively a scam / ponzi scheme) but rather it's largely based on a central bank creating the money for them and lending it to them at near 0% rates.
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