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> The blockchain is for censorship resistance. That’s it. Use cases such as buying drugs, gambling, tax evasion, sharing secrets, capital flight and scamming pe

by 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
> I'm not quite sure how you would use Bitcoin for tax evasion. Just guessing (and this also applies to money laundering): using undeclared/ill-acquired funds to buy bitcoin, which are not taxed and cannot be traced back to you (if you take the necessary protections). Selling it back when you need liquidity.
skywhopper 9y ago
Most drug and gambling providers engage in criminal activity (beyond the mere violation of drug and gambling regulation) to maintain their market. If you pay someone in Bitcoin, and they spend that Bitcoin on something else, and none of those transactions are properly reported for their income or capital gains implications, that's tax evasion. Bitcoin facilitates it because it doesn't have the built-in processes for handling large-scale monetary transfers that the traditional banking system does. "Capital flight" presumably means hiding ill-gotten money by using Bitcoin to transport it across borders. A better term might be "money laundering". So, sure sharing secrets is not vice, but the rest are or contribute to it. The point is that most of the value of Bitcoin is wrapped up in vice.

by baddox 9y ago

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

> I'm not quite sure how you would use Bitcoin for tax evasion. Just guessing (and this also applies to money laundering): using undeclared/ill-acquired funds to buy bitcoin, which are not taxed and cannot be traced back to you (if you take the necessary protections). Selling it back when you need liquidity.

skywhopper 9y ago

Most drug and gambling providers engage in criminal activity (beyond the mere violation of drug and gambling regulation) to maintain their market. If you pay someone in Bitcoin, and they spend that Bitcoin on something else, and none of those transactions are properly reported for their income or capital gains implications, that's tax evasion. Bitcoin facilitates it because it doesn't have the built-in processes for handling large-scale monetary transfers that the traditional banking system does. "Capital flight" presumably means hiding ill-gotten money by using Bitcoin to transport it across borders. A better term might be "money laundering". So, sure sharing secrets is not vice, but the rest are or contribute to it. The point is that most of the value of Bitcoin is wrapped up in vice.