[Hellion]

It’s amounted to a lot, actually. One of the stated goals of Bitcoin was to reduce government control. And it has, magnificently: in the drug trade.

Seriously, online drug marketplaces have become massive and highly lucrative. Estimates vary anywhere between $700 million to over $1 billion each year.

Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries. So much so, that an estimated floor of $3-4 bil of cryptocurrency assets during the peak was just that.

I used to joke: if someone says they’re into crypto currencies, they’re either a tool or have good ketamine. Years later, that rule still shakes out.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Estimates vary anywhere between $700 million to over $1 billion each year

That’s a rounding error to the half a trillion dollar global drug trade [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade

[Hellion]

So what?

It’s still a billion dollars and it has been steadily growing every year.

[hestefisk]

Is this a Bn in drug volume traded or a Bn of revenue that the exchange takes as a % of the drug $ traded? If the latter your estimate prob make sense, although I don’t know what their margin is.

[ipnon]

We're still in the "Internet is a way for university professors to send BBS messages" phase of crypto adoption. Ethereum didn't go live until 2015, 7 years ago. ARPANET went live in 1975. The WWW spec wasn't submitted until 1989, 14 years later!

That's my theory, please no bully!

[kareemsabri]

The problem with your theory is that there's actually no argument to it. It's just piggybacking on the utility of the internet to cast crypto in a more favorable light. It might be that crypto will take a long time to become useful, but saying "the internet took a long time to become useful" is not providing ANY evidence that crypto is like the internet.

Lots of things take a long time and never become useful. One thing (the internet) took a longish time to become really useful.

[somenameforme]

It was quite easy to imagine great uses for the internet, but they sounded pie in the sky - until they weren't. It's a similar issue with crypto. Being able to rapidly send or receive money anywhere in the world to anybody with a computer, independent of any third party, is itself already an absolutely amazing possibility. The only thing missing is largely what was missing from the internet for decades - large scale adoption for utility.

One major difference here is that the grand vision for the internet stood to help governments in many ways, whereas cryptocurrency stands to weaken governments in many ways. Currency controls enables nation to try to tune their own local economies, control international trade rates, go infinitely far into debt, and can also work as a great weapon against enemy nations. Widescale cryptocurrency adoption would stand to shatter all of this, and that's something no major government is going to just idly allow to happen.

I would also add that in the zeitgeist of the world today, the internet would likely have taken far longer to materialize than it did in the past, for reasons analogous to those with crypto. Can you imagine the US's response to digitally interlinking with China or Russia? For that matter China or Russia's view on the same. We live in a brave new world where each nation wants to strictly control their messaging while limiting, or eliminating, outside views. The internet works to undermine all of that.

[otabdeveloper4]

> independent of any third party

You need third parties to cash in and cash out, so no.

> Can you imagine the US's response to digitally interlinking with China or Russia?

Before the internet we had the phone network, and before that the mail. Both of those are more interlinked and more open than the internet is today.

[somenameforme]

You do not need a third party - that's one of the many great things about this. You can go download (or compile, or make) software right now to generate a completely functioning Bitcoin wallet that you can then send/receive coins from.

[otabdeveloper4]

Bitcoin is not money, as its practitioners always say. You need a third party to convert it to money.

[arcticbull]

With all due respect, part of why the Internet took so long to roll out is because we had to find ways to deploy a global network of physical hardware and interconnections. We literally laid wires under the ocean.

Crypto is just software. There's no need to deploy infrastructure. Bitcoin is old enough to be in high school. Soon it'll be old enough to be in college. At some point we have to accept that it's not fit for purpose, do we not? It can't just be BBS-ing forever.

Compare other things that came out in 2007/8. The iPhone and Android, for instance. In spite of actually needing to build and deploy both hardware and software, everyone on earth has one. Billions and billions deployed.

I challenge you to find a way to falsify your thesis.

[x-complexity]

> Crypto is just software. There's no need to deploy infrastructure. Bitcoin is old enough to be in high school. Soon it'll be old enough to be in college. At some point we have to accept that it's not fit for purpose, do we not? It can't just be BBS-ing forever.

This argument relies on the assumption that Bitcoin's age is a proper marker for the entire industry, whereas most of its development only finally kicked off during the ICO mania.

It also relies on the assumption that Bitcoin's decisions reflect the entire industry's decisions, which by proof of contradiction (via anti-BCH-BTCers), does not exist: Many parts of the system are off doing their own part of the whole.

> Compare other things that came out in 2007/8. The iPhone and Android, for instance. In spite of actually needing to build and deploy both hardware and software, everyone on earth has one. Billions and billions deployed.

Apple is a centralized company that can dictate what its products will look like & can standardize their product evolutions to take future developments into account via executive/managerial leadership. Even if all of the decisions were made by the designers/devs, no one from outside the company can have a say about the hardware parts of the product, with only a relatively small part of the software side being accessible to 3rd party developers: Said developers can't access the core internals of iOS without working for Apple.

In contrast, BTC started out with relatively little leadership: While Satoshi was part of Bitcoin's early development, his control over the network was still contingent on other participants within the same network agreeing to the changes -- Disagreements are where the Bitcoin block size wars & subsequent forks emerged. At any time, a developer can modify the core parts of the codebase without restrictions, with the main limiting factor being getting other people to use that modified code instead.

IMO, are more apt comparison would be to compare it with other protocols like Bittorrent and IPFS, whose development nature is not fully controlled by a select group of people, and where everyone can modify the internals of the software to their desires. Similar to Bitcoin, however, adoption of the modified software is dependent on the modifier convincing others to use their code instead.

[rvz]

There you go. Hence, the parent comment has falsified their own sentence, by making a false comparison (iPhone, Android) in the first place and by making a sweeping generalization of the whole crypto industry, just because the first one is useless. So the whole argument in their sentence is invalid.

A better comparison would be on the protocol level like Bittorrent, IPFS, etc.

[e9]

I agree with you, as you said the only uses are drugs and hiding money from governments. But it's also kind of like saying creative writing (novels, poetry, etc) doesn't have a use beyond entertaining and stimulating mind. Code and concepts in crypto are much like that too, to stimulate and entertain the mind.

[miracle2k]

Ipv6 is software too.

[otabdeveloper4]

Yes, and like "crypto" it's also solving a problem nobody wanted to solve.

[p1mrx]

Well nobody wanted to run out of IPv4 addresses.

[prepend]

I don’t think that’s a valid comparison as technologies build on each other and aren’t serial.

Ethereum would not take the same time as arpanet because we already have a mature arpanet.

Compare it to companies like PayPal that have really shown viability after only a few years and by 7 years were very mature.

[rchaud]

The killer app of the Internet was email, not the WWW as a whole. ISPs would provide a free inbox, and by 1997 Hotmail made free email available globally.

Email was what got people to sign up for dial-up internet in the first place. Prior to that, you'd have to schlep over to a copy shop to fax things over. Only businesses could afford the cost of a fax line.

The fallacy is in thinking that Web3 needs to achieve a critical mass of users that the WWW did. That's incorrect. Consumers adopted email, not WWW. That was just something that took off after the core adoption already happened. Same way Instagram took off after enough people bought camera-enabled smartphones.

[quickthrower2]

No reason to compare number of years. It is not a good measure or a linear one. Tech space-time is warped. You didn’t have the overnight unicorns in the 70s. It took decades to get really big. With todays network effects, cryptocurrency should have proved itself already.

[imtringued]

That would mean leaving Bitcoin and Ethereum behind.

[arcticbull]

Using Bitcoin for illegal transactions is simply prosecution futures. Governments and LEOs have and continue to develop automatic de-anonymization tooling and let's face it 2-3tps, it doesn't have to be fast lol. You're basically just scribbling down all your crimes under a pseudonym and mailing it to the FBI, CIA and PRC with a note saying 'bet you can't guess who I am.' I bet you they can, guy.

> Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries.

Again certainly not BTC. Any one of those stories over the last few months of people using Bitcoin as a currency of last resort are so sad because they all got rekt. Had they bought USDC or a hypothetical future CBDC or e-cash, they would be so much better off.

There's that story about the Ukrainian refugee who put his last $2000 worth into BTC when he fled the Russians. That's worth like $900 now.

[paulpauper]

I used to joke: if someone says they’re into crypto currencies, they’re either a tool or have good ketamine. Years later, that rule still shakes out.

And now a third option: a late adopter who is looking at large losses.

Cryptocurrencies have also become useful asset stores for the wealthy living in authoritarian countries. So much so, that an estimated floor of $3-4 bil of cryptocurrency assets during the peak was just that.

Based on what? And this is still tiny relative to $2.5 trillion market size. Billionaires have no use for Bitcoin to hide wealth. Bitcoin does not bypass the financial system since you still have to convert fiat to btc or btc back to fiat.

[easrng]

But you don't use bitcoin to buy drugs, you'd want to use monero.

[galangalalgol]

Do people really use either? My impression is that most people use credit cards.

[easrng]

idk the people i know who buy drugs either use monero (online) or cash (in person)

[paulpauper]

hmm but you still have to cash out and convert btc to monero or monero to btc . It's not as simple as use monero.