As the article points out, Sci-Hub relies on bitcoin for international donations but the majority of its donations come via Yandex.Money, a Russian version of PayPal. I guess that means that most of its donations come from Russians and other CIS nationals with access to Yandex.Money.
I think I understand the meaning of the comment (some things that are good for terrorists, like an untraceable currency or messaging app) are good for everyone. Then to be fair Russia has a very relaxed view on copyright (just having a look at VK or yandex music.. it's just full of pirated Western content) and Russian activists are often the first adopters of privacy apps. Ну да, он это не так хорошо сказал.
It's interesting that Russia, which is seen as semi- or outright Fascist by many Americans, is much more free than the U.S. is. At least in terms of information freedom and surveillance. The further removed an individual is from the seat of world power, the less necessary it is for every aspect of their lives to be controlled.
Because jpkoning mentioned Russians and terrorists are the usual excuse used to pretend that secure (ie not amenable to blackballing) banking infrastructure is a bad thing, when in fact it's
> good for everyone.
with the exception of repressive govenments that want to shut down things like Sci-Hub.
The leaders of those governments will eventually figure out how to launder their bribes through bitcoin (if they haven’t already), and then it’ll be good for the oppressive governments too.
Most of the time, they are suitable for standard payment amounts, but they can spike to quite high levels that make only large amounts worth transacting. This is due to network capacity limitations.
Furthermore, anyone that does not wish to hold BTC - understandable due to its significant volatility - must convert it again into the preferred currency.
Fees = friction, and there's enough friction now that people will only use it when it provides some significant utility.
Bitcoin isn't necessarily well aligned to what people usually think of as a "currency".
It's an entirely new beast in the financial instrument space.
It does bear some characteristics of traditional currencies, but not all of them.
Specifically, as it works today, and until Lightning gets some traction, BTC isn't very convenient for small day to day transactions like buying a cup of coffee.
On the flipside, it does have attributes that traditional currencies strictly do not have.
For cases such as the OP, there is no other financial instrument on the planet that will cut it (other than things like Monero / ZCash / MimbleWimble).
Besides being antifragile and censorship resistant, there is also a very strong case to be made for Bitcoin in the 'preservation of wealth' niche (if you are strongly insensitive to short-term volatility, and capable of playing on a 5 year time horizon, that is).
[EDIT]: To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power.
> To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power.
Also for VPN providers, and their customers. And generally for people who want to buy stuff and lease online services ~anonymously. If one mixes well enough, that is.
And avoids using a mixer that decides to screw you over, and avoids using a mixer that gets taken down because hey - guess what? That's basically money laundering and the jail time for that sort of thing can be pretty hefty.
A mixer is not “money laundering”. As I understand it, “money laundering” is when you conceal from somebody, usually the tax authorities, the reason you have the money. If someone has no income to speak of, and still has a lot of cash, that’s suspicious. A “mixer” in this case would be analogous to exchanging the physical bills for bills with different serial numbers. But this does not alleviate suspicion, the problem of the money being unexplained remains. So they can “launder” the money; i.e. pretend that they have a hair salon business or something similar, and then declare that a lot of people are coming to their salon and spending money, even though there aren’t. But this now provides an explanation for the amount of money they have; the money is now “laundered”, even though it’s the same physical cash as before.
That's true. You never mix any more than you're willing to lose. And sure, it's money laundering. But money laundering in defense of freedom from oppression is OK, as I see it.
I'm OK with that. And it's impossible to avoid, if you're using systems with any chance of protecting your privacy. Also, criminals tend to attract lots of attention, and they're often careless, so they act as canaries.
There is the concern that you'll end up with Bitcoin that's been tainted in one way or another. However, at least some mixing services get coin from miners, so it's clean. And you can check for that in the blockchain.
That's mostly a concern when you're mixing Bitcoin before converting it to meatspace fiat. If you're anonymizing Bitcoin purchased with meatspace fiat, it doesn't matter so much if some is tainted. Or at least, it won't unless tainted coin gets blacklisted.
Admittedly (!) exaggerated, but are you not also providing cover for criminals by doing not essential things (like playing tennis), because criminals would be catched easily if no law abiding citizen would do that kind of things, right?
Mirimir earns his Bitcoin, so there's no cash involved.
But no matter how you get the Bitcoin, you can get whatever degree of anonymity you want, by mixing it many times. You mix via Tor and nested VPN chains, with a different Whonix VM and mixing service for each mix.
you can buy bitcoin KYC free on bisq.network (but there is a premium). Very low risk of loss of funds. You can even use zelle which is supported by most banks.
Bitcoin ATMs definitely have surveillance cameras - if they don't, the area surrounding their location do. As far as I know there are only a handful of older Bitcoin ATM brands that don't have a camera and even the brand I'm thinking of Lamassu has added cameras in their later models.[1]
There are forks of Bitcoin that solve (most of) these problems and make it more usable as an actual currency, rather than a gold-like store of value. "Bitcoin Cash" is the most famous, there are others.
Frankly the failure of "original" Bitcoin to adapt to use as a currency seems to me to be a total failure of vision.
My understanding of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV is that they have just increased the blocksize the clients can handle. Is there something more to them than that?
Not really, but the result is essentially no fees. And thanks to Moore’s Law there’s no trade-off for it. Bitcoin (Core) is insane for having high fees.
Yes. It's really worth dwelling on the long-term implications of terabyte+ sized blocks and fees of a thousand of a cent. This is where BSV is heading and everything changes at that scale. New use cases are unlocked. Old architectures need to be rethought. It's the most interesting technology I've encountered in a long time and it's a gem of entrepreneurship opportunity for those that can stomach swimming upstream.
there's also sidechains, segwit, and lightning network which shrink and consolidate transactions to increase the number of them that can fit in a block
First, the market seems to strongly disagree with you [1]
Second, what seems to me a total failure of vision is trying to shoehorn something as new and disruptive as Bitcoin in the old and worn out yoke of currencies as they used to exist. There's paypal for that.
Coinbase has 30M+ users. Extrapolating from that I'd say roughly 100M people use Bitcoin to some extent, and it's growing pretty rapidly (20% growth on /r/bitcoin subscribers this year). Using means storing or transferring value in Bitcoin.
That's a strange thing to say without any substantiation. How many cryptolockers use Monero over Bitcoin? How many carding forums accept Monero over Bitcoin? How many darknet markets use Monero over Bitcoin? How many scammers scam you into buying them Monero over gift cards/western union/wire transfer/bitcoin?
Sure many support Monero, but none at the exclusion of Bitcoin.
Customers don't want to put themselves at risk either. Most illegal activity is rapidly switching to monero as people learn that Bitcoin is easily traceable unless people take confusing and expensive countermeasures. It's not difficult to swap between different cryptocurrencies and there are major exchanges in almost all countries to directly get monero anyway
The problem of turning money to and from monero still seems to exist though. That point where I want to take some of that monero and turn it into cash to buy tangible illegal things nearby and that other point where I want to take some illegal cash and turn it into moneros. At that point, that money needs to pass through a system that records its existence.
With cash, that money can change hands hundreds of times without it ever being tracked by anyone.
The only way a digital currency can ever be safely used for illegal activities if if it can be used and acquired as freely, easily and as anonymously as cash.
From what i've seen there's no digital equivalent to 'handing someone a suitcase full of cash in a dark alley' or receiving your 'cheque' at the end of the day as a wad of cash in an envelope.
With that cash, I can immediately turn around and spend it on some illegal shit and no record any where will ever exist of me being paid or having purchased illegal things. I can then go and spend that money just as easily in a store, where again, no records of where that money came from exists. It'll just appear(or reappear most likely) in circulation magically when the store records it as profit.
Creating a digital currency like this that actually functions as a currency seems unfeasible. Cash only works as it does because everybody just kind of agrees it does or because the government says it does I suppose.
As an addendum and disclaimer, I wrote a lot of this from a first person point of view, that was for dramatic descriptive purposes only and not from any actual personal perspective or activities.
Monero works like that just fine. You just have to actually use it for everything, rather than convert into physical cash. Just get your provider of tangible things to accept Monero.
If you really need cash, you can also just (physically) go to someone who has cash and tell them "I'll transfer you some Monero coins if you give me some cash and don't record that you did".
Barely anyone understands this technology well, and so they listen to celebrity Bitcoiners that have a vested interest. It's also difficult to find the one good alternative project among is a sea of well-funded scams. Marketing is important. Real usage is also a niche activity compared to speculation at this stage