[wpietri]

Thanks. That's a plausible hypothetical. Could you name an organization like that? One that you are eager to donate to? How many people would like to donate to it? What's the total payment volume per year?

The only organization I can think of that might be in that category is Wikileaks. But they take both credit cards and Paypal, so they don't qualify. Maybe Hamas or Al Qaeda? Except that those are illegal to donate to, so the market is not going to be large.

[darkmighty]

Library Genesis/SciHub[1], and its various access portals[2].

Honestly LibGen+SciHub is doing more for humanity than almost any organization I know of. It's the next generation complement (not replacement) of Wikipedia -- truly opening the entirety of Man's knowledge to anyone.

I don't oppose paying content creators, but I suspect the vast majority of people accessing this knowledge wouldn't do so under traditional publishing. This shows copyright is largely outdated, not serving society optimally as it should.

As for Bitcoin and blockchains... my opinion is that they are extremely useful for efforts like those (and other niches like totalitarian states), if not much else. Perhaps paradoxically I also (controversially) think they should be outlawed and/or heavily regulated (outlawed but as a lightweight non-criminal offense). The potential for theft and money laundering is too large otherwise.

In the limit where everyone used perfect secrecy coins, paying taxes would need to be largely voluntary. And I suppose we all know how well that would turn out.

So I think cryptocurrencies are meant to be underground. It will always be possible to acquire some under the censorship conditions they are really useful for. So restricting their usage mainly curbs trivialized laundering.

[1] https://sci-hub.nu/

[2] e.g. http://booksc.org/howtodonate.php, it does support amazon gift cards too but I find that inconvenient

[wpietri]

Thanks! That's a good example. Very niche, so it's probably not enough to sustain a robust financial network. But I agree they could happily piggyback on a more general "light crime" cryptocurrency.

[TJSomething]

I once backed crowdfunded hardware before crowdfunding services like Kickstarter were really a thing and they couldn't really get their credit card provider to accept the risk, so I had to use an international wire transfer for it. I guess cryptocurrency would be decent for that.

That really just boils down to cryptocurrency being good for business models that are so new that they sound really risky. I'm not really sure that enabling such models is really a net good to society.