[immibis]

That's wrong - crypto's main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services on the internet.

Its secondary value is buying and selling legal goods and services on the internet without having to deal with credit card companies, but only for techbros.

[mrb]

"main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services"

Nah. Far more people use crypto for speculation than for actually illicit purposes.

[gmadsen]

By far the largest portion of the market is bitcoin. Bitcoin is inherently traceable from the ledger and IRS is always looking for large tax fraud.

[immibis]

They can only speculate because of the value brought to it by illicit purposes.

[dartos]

I don’t think you could possibly know that.

[1ark]

I think you could probe into some truth about it by looking at the volumes being traded on exchanges and how much are in the exchange's wallets.

[immibis]

But that's true about fiat money, too. Far more fiat money gets traded on exchanges in a single day, than circulates the rest of the whole world's economy in a year. But I think you'd agree fiat money derives its value from the way you can go down to the corner store and buy stuff, not from the fact it's traded on exchanges, right?

[1ark]

My argument at this point was only that speculation probably triumphs illicit usage. Do you mean that speculation is built on top of illicit use for crypto? It maybe doesn't even matter what the fundamental beliefs are because it has a price, today, now.

Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.

[strangattractor]

You are forgetting ransom payments for hijacking corporate computer systems. Or money laundering. I am sure there are more. Not being a criminal I don't know what they are.

[strangattractor]

I forgot buying fentanyl from China.

"Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s behalf. " [1]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

[red-iron-pine]

It's wicked cool for the ~15 or so tech bros in SV doing that.

But outside of a couple of meme articles about how "someone bought a house with BTC!" the only use case I can find for crypto is money laundering or ransomeware.