[failuser]

Crypto facilitates bypassing financial regulations, drug trade, evading taxes, extorting ransoms, breaking sanctions and so on. I’m not at all surprised it’s popular. I’m surprised that even relatively sane US admin did not crush it.

[toenail]

Money is used in crime, nothing surprising there, and the most popular money for crime is the USD.

[sneak]

This is a common retort used by crypto proponents (of which I am one). It overlooks, however, that is it much, much, much easier to do large-scale financial crime using cryptocurrencies than it is to do so with USD due to the intense and robust controls applied to USD for precisely that purpose.

One need only look at the rapid rise of cryptocurrencies in criminal enterprises over the last 10 years or so to see the truth in that.

[BoppreH]

Well, USD has many other (legal) uses. I have yet to see a legal use for Bitcoin that was not better served by cash or traditional banking.

[toenail]

I have been saving in bitcoin since I understood it, and people who tell me bitcoin has no use simply make no sense to me. My purchasing power goes up in the long term, and much more than theirs even if they "invest" with traditional banking.

[BoppreH]

Ah, my apologies. You're right, financial speculation is also a prime use case for cryptocurrencies.

Personally I'm also against it, but you're correct that it's a legal use case.

[Der_Einzige]

It’s because we were promised cheap, fast, and decentralized and got the opposite.

It’s expensive as hell to use crypto to move money. It’s very slow, and I’m forced to use centralized coin exchanges which destroy the original decentralized nature of the currencies.

Why should we be excited about a product that is the opposite of what it sets out to do?

[toenail]

You want what was promised, but you use it in the way that's prescribed by the state, that's your failure. Besides, why do people keep pretending like lightning doesn't exist..

[andirk]

You can use Lightning. I agree its main promise is still in the works, but the digital gold thing is also a feature.

[phil21]

I find a good use in it via making legal, but otherwise “high risk” transactions traditional financial institutions either don’t touch or make very difficult to engage in.

Much easier for me to send a small amount of crypto to a VPN provider, or a custom parts supplier in a “strange” country where Visa/MC/bank wires are a huge hassle if available at all.

It’s not a huge use case, but it removes a ton of unnecessary friction from transactions traditional banking left behind as deemed “not worth the hassle” to them.

Or as I describe it: Digital cash. I don’t need the flea market vendor to need to be vetted by some financial provider to sell me their 3d printed parts collection.

[sneak]

Cross-border remittances is one. Making donations to organizations that are being actively persecuted/censored by the state is another.

[BoppreH]

Sometimes that's the right thing to do, but none of those examples sound legal.

[sneak]

Donating to Wikileaks is entirely legal. The blockade undertaken by Visa and MC at the behest of the USG was extralegal; there were no charges against anyone at the time.

Even had there been charges, donating would still have been legal.

Furthermore, your criterion was “not better served”; please don’t move the goalposts.

Remittances and cross-border donations are way better served by cryptocurrencies than any other mechanism, full stop. It’s faster, cheaper, and way more reliable than any other method.

[toenail]

Cross border remittances are not legal?

[BoppreH]

Of course it can be legal, but if someone is using cryotocurrencies for this purpose then they're probably skipping some necessary steps.

They could also just really like cryptocurrencies, but that's not a point in favor of the technology.

[divbzero]

China, on the other hand, did.

[2017]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/11/bitcoin-price-falls-on-repor... "Bitcoin price falls again on reports that China is shutting down local exchanges"

[2021]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/22/china-crypto-crackdown-wipes... "China’s renewed crypto crackdown wipes $400 billion off the market as bitcoin slides"

[dist-epoch]

You realize the irony of looking at those titles, and then at the present day price of bitcoin, which is 25x, 10x the price at the time of those articles.

[XorNot]

Is that trade happening substantially in China and the Yuan?

[spaceman_2020]

If you are even remotely involved in crypto, you know how big crypto is in China. The biggest exchanges are Chinese or Chinese owned (Binance)

[tim333]

It's hard to crush. The whole design is made that way so if you shut it down in one country it continues in other ones.

Also it funnels money to the people running it which enables them to lobby etc politicians.