7 ms·

Bitcoin Is for Drugs

49 points by robertelder 9y ago

verbatim 9y ago
I'm not sure if it's ironic, or fitting, that the end of the article is a piece of artwork credited only as "Please let me know if you know the source of this image."
- ihuman 9y ago
  Its art for the "Satoshi Creator of Blockchain" card in the game Spells of Genesis, a mobile game based on "blockchain technology." http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b1c73a1c7febea81b3d3163aff2aff4/tumblr_inline_obbta5fOv91t44dvb_400.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b1c73a1c7febea81b3d3163aff2aff4/...
Chris2048 9y ago
No, it's not "for" vice. It's just there's more reason to use bc for those things, so those are "early adopters". There is nothing stopping you use it for anything else.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Except for the many better payment options for legal transactions.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    like Paypal? aka freeze anytime at our discretion.
czz 9y ago
when you have a scarce resource with the consensus of many people, digital or physical, it works.
joewrong 9y ago
replace "Bitcoin" with "Cash"
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  Cash doesn't randomly increase several times in value and require significant fees and time for confirmation.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwaway2016a 9y ago
> The blockchain is for censorship resistance. The blockchain is for having an immutable[1] log of transactions that does not require trust in the peer that you are making a transaction with. Off the top of my head... - Bank transactions - Security audit logs - Securities (stocks) - Corporate governance - Actual government - Legitimate business transactions where you don't want to have to worry about charge backs or bounced checks The article also falls into the trap of thinking Bitcoin and Blockchain are anonymous. They are not. Some blockchains try to be more anonymous. Bitcoin is not one of them. [1] Yes, I know the blockchain can be forked which in theory makes transactions mutable. However, the barrier to take advantage of that is prohibitively high and highly visible (i.e. is hard to do in secret).
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  Furthermore... James Hudon has as his profile in Twitter "Bitcoin Bandit"... and this is his first and only Medium post... what is the motivation here?
- tedsanders 9y ago
  Blockchain does not reduce the need for trust, in my opinion. If I order pizza from you and pay with Bitcoin, I still have to trust that you'll deliver the pizza. There is no way around the need for trust (though of course there are mechanisms such as laws, police, and judges that help reinforce trust in our society). The only trust that blockchain provides is trust that a counterparty won't go back and change the ledger showing that a pizza was ordered. This solves the double spending problem, but it doesn't solve all the other kinds of fraud.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    Agreed. I should have been more specific. It reduces the need to trust the person initiating the transaction. That person still needs to trust the entity that is supposed to provide value in exchange for that transaction. Unless the blockchain supports contracts and you have a well coded contract.
- sliken 9y ago
revicon 9y ago
I buy BBQ from Smokey J's (https://www.smokeyjbbq.com https://www.smokeyjbbq.com) in Berkeley, CA with bitcoin. They have an android tablet under the counter for taking transactions, it's great! Never bought drugs with them before, according to the artice maybe I should try...
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  There is a place in Montreal that takes Bitcoin for Poutine. Unfortunately I didn't have any on me lats time I was there.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    There for PyCon by chance? The bitcoin poutine place (one of several places that accepted bitcoin on that street, I noticed) was like 4 blocks from the convention center. That was a fun PyCon.
    - throwaway2016a 9y ago
      No. Unfortunately I don't make it to conferences as often as I'd like. I just live in New Hamsphire and it only takes me 4 and a half hours to drive to Montreal. It makes a good weekend getaway if I don't want to hop a plane :)
bradleyjg 9y ago
There are a lot of people living near me that want to send money back to relatives in the country where they were born on a regular basis. One of the advantages that are often touted as a legitimate use of bitcoin is to lower transaction costs. In light of that claim, I wonder how difficult it would be for: one of my neighbors in Queens, NY to take $1000 cash, turn it into bitcoin, send it to a brother in Cebu City, Pachuca, or Dhaka; for the brother to turn those bitcoins into Philippine or Mexican pesos or Bangladeshi takas; how long it would take; and finally how much it would end up costing versus the mid-market exchange rate between dollars and the other currency.
- halflings 9y ago
  What about the transaction cost to/from bitcoin? It seems like such a hassle compared to something like Transferwise which already gives decent transaction costs.
- cgb223 9y ago
  I think the main issue that would have to be addressed is the "turn cash into bitcoin" step. While I havent personally done an in person bitcoin exchange, I'd imagine that there aren't too many people doing it this way, and probably not in quantities of $1000+. I would love to hear about the experiences of people who have done this. The other option would be to setup a bank account, which might be a bit of a challenge if the person is not a citizen, or perhaps not even in the country legally, and then there's the issue of the money now having a permanent digital paper trail (not bad per-se, but probably something your typical migrant worker sending money home might try to avoid (but seriously pay your taxes))
  - diegoprzl 9y ago
    Turning cash into bitcoin can be as easy as buying gift cards. I sold bitcoins in person around 2012-2013. I had way more demand than bitcoins I was willing to sell.
    - bradleyjg 9y ago
wamsachel 9y ago
D.A.R.E Drug Acquisitions Require Encryption
TTPrograms 9y ago
It seems like it requires a particularly narrow world view to equate censorship resistance with vice.
- hudon 9y ago
  I agree and I didn't mean to equate them. Many people make the mistake and say requests for privacy means you have something to hide. The fact that digital tools that offer censorship resistance, be it Tor, Tails or Bitcoin have applications for BOTH activists and criminals (just like cash or weapons or bridges or ...) could be an article in itself and requires more diligence than an article that is basically saying "blockchains are shit for anything that doesn't need censorship resistance".
mrtron 9y ago
VCRs are for porn.
ve55 9y ago
I've done a lot of work involving buying and selling virtual goods (not cryptocurrencies, think of currency in an online game as an example). A lot of communities in these areas love bitcoin, not becuase they want to scam anyone, but precisely the opposite: becuase they are tired of being scammed. Do you know what you have to do when you use Paypal to buy digital goods from many persons or companies? You have to send them your ID, a picture of you next to your ID, often confirm a phone call or email, and then pay an extra fee. Because if they don't make customers do that, they will get scammed by chargebacks no matter what, and lose all of their money. People are tired of bullshit like Paypal, and that's why they prefer Bitcoin. I agree with some points the author has, I don't think there's anyone that thinks the valuation of recent ICOs on the Ethereum network are anywhere near reasonable, but just because things are significantly overvalued doesn't mean the entire technology is for scamming. Just like there's reasons to not exclusively use Amazon/Google, there's reasons to not exclusively use USD/Paypal/Banks/etc.
- mamcx 9y ago
  The problem is that buy the bitcoin in some places, like Colombia, is hell. I'm trying in like 6 different places and not chance to work.
unixhero 9y ago
Fuck off; to the article.
TACIXAT 9y ago
I have a lot of problems with how cryptocurrencies are dressed up to look like investments. Everyone talks about the market cap as if it were a company with some underlying value and some public value. I feel that is very misleading. As well, with the charts and trading platforms, less educated adopters are treating it like a company that produces value. It is a digital collectible. There are a finite number of them produced (in Bitcoin's case, at least). The price is high due to speculative demand. People hoard them and lose them, and the price will continue to rise until it collapses. It is extremely deflationary and has no monetary controls in place to stabilize it. Government backed currencies have value because of taxes. Everyone must pay taxes in the designated currency and failure to do so is punished by a monopoly on force (the government can make your life miserable for not paying). There is no necessitating force, like taxes, for cryptocurrencies. The main use case and driving forces in their adoption are illicit (ransomware, dark markets, etc). There are no capital controls either. No one will elect to pay their employees in Bitcoin due to its extremely deflationary nature. No employer will elect to pay someone in a currency without capital controls. For example, if I agreed to pay someone 1 BTC per week for their work, and one week it is worth $1k USD and the next it is $3k USD, I would be getting seriously screwed. Also, since it is unstable, prices will always be pegged to the fiat currency (eg. 5 USD in BTC at the current market price), since charging a fixed amount in Bitcoin would cause people to be unwilling to pay it or the company to take a loss on the sale. I don't know if the illicit markets are enough to sustain demand for cryptocurrencies in the same way that taxes do for normal currencies. I personally view them as a modern day ponzi scheme driven by speculative demand. That is not to say that you can't make money off of them, but don't be surprised if they go the same way as Beanie Babies. Just don't ever expect a major entity to adopt a currency that unknown actors have large control over.
baddox 9y ago
> The blockchain is for censorship resistance. That’s it. Use cases such as buying drugs, gambling, tax evasion, sharing secrets, capital flight and scamming people eclipse all other use cases. > Investing in Bitcoin is investing in vice. Unless the author is using an unfamiliar definition of "vice," I hardly see how this follows. Several of the use cases listed are not what I would consider immoral. Drugs and gambling can obviously lead to addiction, but I don't consider them inherently immoral regardless of whether they are legal in a given jurisdiction. Tax evasion is a little more of a grey area in this context, because I'm not quite sure how you would use Bitcoin for tax evasion. Sharing secrets is completely morally ambiguous; it depends entirely on what the secret is. Does anyone consider capital flight immoral? I've never heard that idea. Lastly, yes, scamming people is fairly unambiguously immoral.
- hudon 9y ago
  Thank you! This should be the biggest takeaway and I could have made it more nuanced, see thread here: https://medium.com/@Tboice/provocative-and-on-point-e3cbe1d706d1 https://medium.com/@Tboice/provocative-and-on-point-e3cbe1d7...
- Avshalom 9y ago
  ... ... Really. Who reading this do you expect to believe you're unfamiliar with drugs and gambling being called 'vice'?
  - baddox 9y ago
    Obviously they are both considered immoral by some people, and even a significant portion of people in certain areas (probably in the USA). But that's also true of many things that I wouldn't expect to be brought up in an article that seems to be focused on technology and not any particular religion or moral system, like cursing or homosexuality. I would make similar comments if someone wrote an article about problems with a digital music store (e.g. iTunes) that primarily focused on the fact that the store is inherently immoral because it sells songs with explicit lyrics.
- halflings 9y ago
rb808 9y ago
I still can't think of any reason for me to use BTC. A couple of friends have bought bitcoin because they think it will go up in value. Maybe it will maybe it wont. I certainly dont want to own BTC when it could fall to zero.
- willitpamp573 9y ago
  BTC is only useful when it's the closest thing to USD that you're able to use for your business. Users of bitcoin exit their position to USD as quickly as they possibly can.
uiri 9y ago
It is a shame that this was flagged on the basis of the title. It is an interesting article with a thesis other than that implied by the clickbait title.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Paul-ish 9y ago
I don't find his scarcity counter argument compelling. All the things he offers as scarce aren't really scarce, as they could easily be recreated in a way such that the duplicates are indistinguishable from the original. Bitcoins can't, to current knowledge, be counterfeit. He would have been better of saying that he could create his own fork of bitcoin with the same supply, but that wouldn't make it valuable.
Dove 9y ago
This argument is exactly analogous to the argument that privacy is for people with something to hide. There's a very good response to that argument, and it applies here as well. It runs thus: sometimes society is wrong. Every advancement in our thinking starts out as a rebellion -- such as the civil rights movement in the 60's. Many of the participants did have something to hide from significant chunks of society, yet what they were doing was ultimately judged to be right. Usually the things society judges to be wrong are wrong -- but sometimes they aren't. I want society to be able to oppose movements when they become large and vocal, and I want society to be able to ban dangerous ideas from public spaces -- but at the same time, I want individuals to be able to study and nurture any ideas they like in privacy, no matter how harmful or radical, because I want the good-but-countercultural ones to grow until they are ready to face society's judgement. Privacy is often used to pursue vice . . . but that is an acceptable price to me, to guarantee individual freedom of inquiry. So it is with cryptocurrencies. And for that matter, cash. Sometimes our laws are wrong, and it is the black market which provides the demonstration and motivation to change them. Prohibition is an obvious example. Uber and Airbnb are controversial, but modern examples. Sex toys are an easily overlooked example. Marijauna legalization comes to mind, too; the laws are changing for that particular drug (and not for, say, Psilocybin) precisely because the scale of the black market has resulted in a lot of people having experience with it and giving us both personal experience and scientific data. If anonymous cash transactions were not possible, that probably wouldn't have happened. The individual ability to buy anything, much like the individual ability to read anything, is both an important personal freedom and an engine for social progress specifically in the areas where society's mores are wrong. Sure, people almost always use this freedom to do things society doesn't approve of (either in the sense of the whole country or in the more restricted sense of their local community). Sure, those are usually things that are actually wrong. But squashing them isn't worth losing the powerful corrective force for society as a whole that arises from those few cases in which the miscreants are right. I do want governments to be able to make laws, to be able to regulate commerce, to declare that certain things can't be bought and sold. But I don't want them to have such an efficient method of enforcement that small scale rebellion isn't possible. A certain persistent, low-level, ongoing engagement in vice is the price of moral experimentation, and I think it's worth it.
- 9y ago

49 points by robertelder 9y ago

I'm not sure if it's ironic, or fitting, that the end of the article is a piece of artwork credited only as "Please let me know if you know the source of this image."

ihuman 9y ago
Its art for the "Satoshi Creator of Blockchain" card in the game Spells of Genesis, a mobile game based on "blockchain technology." http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b1c73a1c7febea81b3d3163aff2aff4/tumblr_inline_obbta5fOv91t44dvb_400.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/1b1c73a1c7febea81b3d3163aff2aff4/...

Chris2048 9y ago

No, it's not "for" vice. It's just there's more reason to use bc for those things, so those are "early adopters". There is nothing stopping you use it for anything else.

lern_too_spel 9y ago
Except for the many better payment options for legal transactions.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  like Paypal? aka freeze anytime at our discretion.

czz 9y ago

when you have a scarce resource with the consensus of many people, digital or physical, it works.

joewrong 9y ago

replace "Bitcoin" with "Cash"

akhilcacharya 9y ago
Cash doesn't randomly increase several times in value and require significant fees and time for confirmation.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwaway2016a 9y ago

> The blockchain is for censorship resistance. The blockchain is for having an immutable[1] log of transactions that does not require trust in the peer that you are making a transaction with. Off the top of my head... - Bank transactions - Security audit logs - Securities (stocks) - Corporate governance - Actual government - Legitimate business transactions where you don't want to have to worry about charge backs or bounced checks The article also falls into the trap of thinking Bitcoin and Blockchain are anonymous. They are not. Some blockchains try to be more anonymous. Bitcoin is not one of them. [1] Yes, I know the blockchain can be forked which in theory makes transactions mutable. However, the barrier to take advantage of that is prohibitively high and highly visible (i.e. is hard to do in secret).

throwaway2016a 9y ago
Furthermore... James Hudon has as his profile in Twitter "Bitcoin Bandit"... and this is his first and only Medium post... what is the motivation here?
tedsanders 9y ago
Blockchain does not reduce the need for trust, in my opinion. If I order pizza from you and pay with Bitcoin, I still have to trust that you'll deliver the pizza. There is no way around the need for trust (though of course there are mechanisms such as laws, police, and judges that help reinforce trust in our society). The only trust that blockchain provides is trust that a counterparty won't go back and change the ledger showing that a pizza was ordered. This solves the double spending problem, but it doesn't solve all the other kinds of fraud.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  Agreed. I should have been more specific. It reduces the need to trust the person initiating the transaction. That person still needs to trust the entity that is supposed to provide value in exchange for that transaction. Unless the blockchain supports contracts and you have a well coded contract.
sliken 9y ago

revicon 9y ago

I buy BBQ from Smokey J's (https://www.smokeyjbbq.com https://www.smokeyjbbq.com) in Berkeley, CA with bitcoin. They have an android tablet under the counter for taking transactions, it's great! Never bought drugs with them before, according to the artice maybe I should try...

throwaway2016a 9y ago
There is a place in Montreal that takes Bitcoin for Poutine. Unfortunately I didn't have any on me lats time I was there.
- jMyles 9y ago
  There for PyCon by chance? The bitcoin poutine place (one of several places that accepted bitcoin on that street, I noticed) was like 4 blocks from the convention center. That was a fun PyCon.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    No. Unfortunately I don't make it to conferences as often as I'd like. I just live in New Hamsphire and it only takes me 4 and a half hours to drive to Montreal. It makes a good weekend getaway if I don't want to hop a plane :)

bradleyjg 9y ago

There are a lot of people living near me that want to send money back to relatives in the country where they were born on a regular basis. One of the advantages that are often touted as a legitimate use of bitcoin is to lower transaction costs. In light of that claim, I wonder how difficult it would be for: one of my neighbors in Queens, NY to take $1000 cash, turn it into bitcoin, send it to a brother in Cebu City, Pachuca, or Dhaka; for the brother to turn those bitcoins into Philippine or Mexican pesos or Bangladeshi takas; how long it would take; and finally how much it would end up costing versus the mid-market exchange rate between dollars and the other currency.

halflings 9y ago
What about the transaction cost to/from bitcoin? It seems like such a hassle compared to something like Transferwise which already gives decent transaction costs.
cgb223 9y ago
I think the main issue that would have to be addressed is the "turn cash into bitcoin" step. While I havent personally done an in person bitcoin exchange, I'd imagine that there aren't too many people doing it this way, and probably not in quantities of $1000+. I would love to hear about the experiences of people who have done this. The other option would be to setup a bank account, which might be a bit of a challenge if the person is not a citizen, or perhaps not even in the country legally, and then there's the issue of the money now having a permanent digital paper trail (not bad per-se, but probably something your typical migrant worker sending money home might try to avoid (but seriously pay your taxes))
- diegoprzl 9y ago
  Turning cash into bitcoin can be as easy as buying gift cards. I sold bitcoins in person around 2012-2013. I had way more demand than bitcoins I was willing to sell.
  - bradleyjg 9y ago

wamsachel 9y ago

D.A.R.E Drug Acquisitions Require Encryption

TTPrograms 9y ago

It seems like it requires a particularly narrow world view to equate censorship resistance with vice.

hudon 9y ago
I agree and I didn't mean to equate them. Many people make the mistake and say requests for privacy means you have something to hide. The fact that digital tools that offer censorship resistance, be it Tor, Tails or Bitcoin have applications for BOTH activists and criminals (just like cash or weapons or bridges or ...) could be an article in itself and requires more diligence than an article that is basically saying "blockchains are shit for anything that doesn't need censorship resistance".

mrtron 9y ago

VCRs are for porn.

ve55 9y ago

I've done a lot of work involving buying and selling virtual goods (not cryptocurrencies, think of currency in an online game as an example). A lot of communities in these areas love bitcoin, not becuase they want to scam anyone, but precisely the opposite: becuase they are tired of being scammed. Do you know what you have to do when you use Paypal to buy digital goods from many persons or companies? You have to send them your ID, a picture of you next to your ID, often confirm a phone call or email, and then pay an extra fee. Because if they don't make customers do that, they will get scammed by chargebacks no matter what, and lose all of their money. People are tired of bullshit like Paypal, and that's why they prefer Bitcoin. I agree with some points the author has, I don't think there's anyone that thinks the valuation of recent ICOs on the Ethereum network are anywhere near reasonable, but just because things are significantly overvalued doesn't mean the entire technology is for scamming. Just like there's reasons to not exclusively use Amazon/Google, there's reasons to not exclusively use USD/Paypal/Banks/etc.

mamcx 9y ago
The problem is that buy the bitcoin in some places, like Colombia, is hell. I'm trying in like 6 different places and not chance to work.

unixhero 9y ago

Fuck off; to the article.

TACIXAT 9y ago

I have a lot of problems with how cryptocurrencies are dressed up to look like investments. Everyone talks about the market cap as if it were a company with some underlying value and some public value. I feel that is very misleading. As well, with the charts and trading platforms, less educated adopters are treating it like a company that produces value. It is a digital collectible. There are a finite number of them produced (in Bitcoin's case, at least). The price is high due to speculative demand. People hoard them and lose them, and the price will continue to rise until it collapses. It is extremely deflationary and has no monetary controls in place to stabilize it. Government backed currencies have value because of taxes. Everyone must pay taxes in the designated currency and failure to do so is punished by a monopoly on force (the government can make your life miserable for not paying). There is no necessitating force, like taxes, for cryptocurrencies. The main use case and driving forces in their adoption are illicit (ransomware, dark markets, etc). There are no capital controls either. No one will elect to pay their employees in Bitcoin due to its extremely deflationary nature. No employer will elect to pay someone in a currency without capital controls. For example, if I agreed to pay someone 1 BTC per week for their work, and one week it is worth $1k USD and the next it is $3k USD, I would be getting seriously screwed. Also, since it is unstable, prices will always be pegged to the fiat currency (eg. 5 USD in BTC at the current market price), since charging a fixed amount in Bitcoin would cause people to be unwilling to pay it or the company to take a loss on the sale. I don't know if the illicit markets are enough to sustain demand for cryptocurrencies in the same way that taxes do for normal currencies. I personally view them as a modern day ponzi scheme driven by speculative demand. That is not to say that you can't make money off of them, but don't be surprised if they go the same way as Beanie Babies. Just don't ever expect a major entity to adopt a currency that unknown actors have large control over.

baddox 9y ago

> The blockchain is for censorship resistance. That’s it. Use cases such as buying drugs, gambling, tax evasion, sharing secrets, capital flight and scamming people eclipse all other use cases. > Investing in Bitcoin is investing in vice. Unless the author is using an unfamiliar definition of "vice," I hardly see how this follows. Several of the use cases listed are not what I would consider immoral. Drugs and gambling can obviously lead to addiction, but I don't consider them inherently immoral regardless of whether they are legal in a given jurisdiction. Tax evasion is a little more of a grey area in this context, because I'm not quite sure how you would use Bitcoin for tax evasion. Sharing secrets is completely morally ambiguous; it depends entirely on what the secret is. Does anyone consider capital flight immoral? I've never heard that idea. Lastly, yes, scamming people is fairly unambiguously immoral.

hudon 9y ago
Thank you! This should be the biggest takeaway and I could have made it more nuanced, see thread here: https://medium.com/@Tboice/provocative-and-on-point-e3cbe1d706d1 https://medium.com/@Tboice/provocative-and-on-point-e3cbe1d7...
Avshalom 9y ago
... ... Really. Who reading this do you expect to believe you're unfamiliar with drugs and gambling being called 'vice'?
- baddox 9y ago
  Obviously they are both considered immoral by some people, and even a significant portion of people in certain areas (probably in the USA). But that's also true of many things that I wouldn't expect to be brought up in an article that seems to be focused on technology and not any particular religion or moral system, like cursing or homosexuality. I would make similar comments if someone wrote an article about problems with a digital music store (e.g. iTunes) that primarily focused on the fact that the store is inherently immoral because it sells songs with explicit lyrics.
halflings 9y ago

rb808 9y ago

I still can't think of any reason for me to use BTC. A couple of friends have bought bitcoin because they think it will go up in value. Maybe it will maybe it wont. I certainly dont want to own BTC when it could fall to zero.

willitpamp573 9y ago
BTC is only useful when it's the closest thing to USD that you're able to use for your business. Users of bitcoin exit their position to USD as quickly as they possibly can.

uiri 9y ago

It is a shame that this was flagged on the basis of the title. It is an interesting article with a thesis other than that implied by the clickbait title.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Paul-ish 9y ago

I don't find his scarcity counter argument compelling. All the things he offers as scarce aren't really scarce, as they could easily be recreated in a way such that the duplicates are indistinguishable from the original. Bitcoins can't, to current knowledge, be counterfeit. He would have been better of saying that he could create his own fork of bitcoin with the same supply, but that wouldn't make it valuable.

Dove 9y ago

This argument is exactly analogous to the argument that privacy is for people with something to hide. There's a very good response to that argument, and it applies here as well. It runs thus: sometimes society is wrong. Every advancement in our thinking starts out as a rebellion -- such as the civil rights movement in the 60's. Many of the participants did have something to hide from significant chunks of society, yet what they were doing was ultimately judged to be right. Usually the things society judges to be wrong are wrong -- but sometimes they aren't. I want society to be able to oppose movements when they become large and vocal, and I want society to be able to ban dangerous ideas from public spaces -- but at the same time, I want individuals to be able to study and nurture any ideas they like in privacy, no matter how harmful or radical, because I want the good-but-countercultural ones to grow until they are ready to face society's judgement. Privacy is often used to pursue vice . . . but that is an acceptable price to me, to guarantee individual freedom of inquiry. So it is with cryptocurrencies. And for that matter, cash. Sometimes our laws are wrong, and it is the black market which provides the demonstration and motivation to change them. Prohibition is an obvious example. Uber and Airbnb are controversial, but modern examples. Sex toys are an easily overlooked example. Marijauna legalization comes to mind, too; the laws are changing for that particular drug (and not for, say, Psilocybin) precisely because the scale of the black market has resulted in a lot of people having experience with it and giving us both personal experience and scientific data. If anonymous cash transactions were not possible, that probably wouldn't have happened. The individual ability to buy anything, much like the individual ability to read anything, is both an important personal freedom and an engine for social progress specifically in the areas where society's mores are wrong. Sure, people almost always use this freedom to do things society doesn't approve of (either in the sense of the whole country or in the more restricted sense of their local community). Sure, those are usually things that are actually wrong. But squashing them isn't worth losing the powerful corrective force for society as a whole that arises from those few cases in which the miscreants are right. I do want governments to be able to make laws, to be able to regulate commerce, to declare that certain things can't be bought and sold. But I don't want them to have such an efficient method of enforcement that small scale rebellion isn't possible. A certain persistent, low-level, ongoing engagement in vice is the price of moral experimentation, and I think it's worth it.

9y ago