Each time we write about Bitcoin and online drug markets we hear from lots of Bitcoin folks who say the topic is not worthy of coverage and is blown out of proportion. It seems worth explaining how I think about this. So a thread.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/technology/bitcoin-black-market.html …
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That has actually captured most of the news coverage to date. But for most ordinary people, there is only going to be so much interest in a new form of financial speculation, especially when, as has been true over the last six months, it has been shrinking.pic.twitter.com/qPM5kXao2d
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Some of the people buying and selling Bitcoin are doing so not to speculate, but to escape repressive local regimes or invest in a new digital gold. We and other news organizations have written a lot about that possibility.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/technology/bitcoin-payments-gold.html …
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But recent data from
@lawmaster suggest that both p2p markets and consumer exchanges have also seen shrinking volume in recent months.https://twitter.com/lawmaster/status/1221369350990462976 …
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When you take out the 92% of Bitcoin activity related to simply buying and selling Bitcoin (and mining), illegal activity becomes a much bigger part of the remaining real world use cases — and one of the few that truly relies on Bitcoin’s unique qualities.
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You can see that in this chart that Chainalysis put together, showing how blockchain traffic breaks down.pic.twitter.com/JdgdGQ6vK7
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Among all non-trading and mining uses, illicit activity accounts for 26 percent of all blockchain transactions. When you throw in gambling and mixing, the figure goes up to 41%. (This also leaves out illicit activity that Chainalysis can't spot, like tax evasion.)
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Some of the rest is legitimate payments — $1.7 billion last year, acc. to Chainalysis. But when you add that to the $748 billion in drug transactions, drugs could be said to be responsible for 31% of all Bitcoin payments.
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The dollar, meanwhile, enabled around $100 trillion in legal payments last year (acc. to the Fed), so total global drug sales would only account for around .5% of all dollar payments.
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(The dollar also enabled lots of other kinds of transactions, like foreign trade, capital markets activity and lending that have no analogue in the Bitcoin world and that probably make many people more willing to tolerate the illegal transactions.)
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These #'s start to provide a picture of why we write about this. It is not just because the black market stuff is sensational. It is also one of the most steadily growing and interesting experiments in how BTC can be used in the real world.
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It's not the only thing we are going to write about in the crypto realm, but it certainly seems worthy of coverage.
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