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For those of you who don't understand how monetary privacy can be useful outside of illegal activities, see this talk by Riccardo Spagni of Monero: https://yout

For those of you who don't understand how monetary privacy can be useful outside of illegal activities, see this talk by Riccardo Spagni of Monero: https://youtu.be/pTgadb7M47E?t=58s https://youtu.be/pTgadb7M47E?t=58s

dingo_bat 9y ago
I just posted a comment saying "I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities." Will be watching the video.
- icelancer 9y ago
  I use BTC to purchase prescription drugs that I have a script for but refuse to pay absurd marked-up US prices for. Is that illegal? I suppose it is by the letter of the law. But certainly not by the spirit of it. I am also a notable figure in some circles and do not want my name or credit card information to appear in the ledgers of certain vendors, despite them being legitimate businesses, due to potential records being exposed from hacking. I therefore use BTC and I've used mixing services on top of that. There's plenty of other reasons, but those are my first-world ones. And I'm not even a privacy nut.
- sowbug 9y ago
  A week ago I bought some beef jerky and a wifi router with Bitcoin at Bic Camera in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Transaction was fast and easy.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    I bought a can of Mountain Dew the other day, with cold hard cash. Transaction was fast, easy and required no computing power.
    - sowbug 9y ago
      I'm really happy for you that you did that! But you started a thread asking whether there were legal uses for Bitcoin, and I answered with one. Why the non sequitur?
- _nedR 9y ago
  >"I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities." A decentralised currency for world trade that doesn't allow an arbitrarily chosen country to profit by simply printing notes and skimming off the top? A payment system that doesn't pick an arbitrary corporation to rake in all the profits by nickel-and-diming every transaction in an economy?
  - simias 9y ago
    That's one side of the coin. I can spin it the other way: bitcoin is a currency that can't be regulated or seized by democratic governments and justice bodies. The entire point of the Bitcoin design is to evade all regulations, the ultimate free market. In many places (in particular in America and the EU) what you call an "arbitrarily chosen country" is effectively a "democratically elected government". It's not perfect of course, there's corruption, there's lobbies but at least there's some amount of accountability. It's also a currency where 75% of all possible coins are currently in circulation and in the hands of a tiny amount of people who are bound to become the new one-percenters (if not 0.01%) if it truly becomes the "world trade currency". With the added benefit to be almost impossible to trace and therefore to tax if the holder is even a little be clever. I'm not saying that it's all white or all black but I'm a bit tired of the cynical libertarian cryptocurrency kool aid. "The current system is flawed, let's break everything and see what happens". And let's make a quick million while we're at it, a new sucker is born every minute.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      But if there is no accountability or regulations the new one-percenters can't become as powerful as the old one-percenters, that rely on the authority of "democratically elected governments".
      - simias 9y ago
        You'll have to give me a more detailed case for that. If we make money harder to tax and regulate the very rich will become less powerful? Won't that just make it even easier to concentrate riches? Given how easy it seems to evade taxes nowadays when you're super rich I can't imagine how it'd be when anybody can basically generate a new untraceable wallet for any transaction. Corruption will never have been so lucrative.
- alimbada 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOcXXB48fI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOcXXB48fI I watched this video a few days ago and my wife was sitting next to me on her own laptop distractedly listening to what I was watching and remarked it was a really good easy to understand explanation of blockchain. The part near the end about software verification was really eye opening for me. I'd never considered the use cases of blockchains and the impact they can have outside of crypto-currencies. I've been reading about and investing in crypto-currencies (mainly ETH) for almost a year now. I'm a software developer so seeing the promise in the technology is easier for me than my wife.
  - simias 9y ago
    The software verification example is contrived and not at all realistic IMO. >My plane could compare the code generated by its wing with the code stored on ledgers in the other 99 planes. So you don't trust the code of your "wings" but you trust the code that verifies it? And why do you need a decentralized architecture for this? Just ask the plane software vendor to certify a version of your software and use that? What does bringing the blockchain into the mix give you? If you're in a truly decentralized scenario (e.g. a lot of open source software) then what he's describing is basically "web of trust" as implemented in PGP for instance. A lot of software is released with a PGP signature to identify the source. Again, blockchain is pointless here. >If the plane was autonomous it could decide not to take off unless all the other 99 planes gave it the ok. What? Why? How? How could the other planes validate that this plane is not lying about its code checksum? And how is the blockchain involved in any of this? >And it's in contrast with how we'd solve this today. The plane would have to have communicated with a central server, a single point of failure, vulnerable to fault and tampering. This central server would be a closed system, owned by one company making it hard for other devices to inter-operate. Ah, so we're going full FUD now. Clearly distributed and redundant architectures are impossible without the blockchain. Well, I'm dumping my retirement fund into Dogecoin, you've convinced me. More seriously, the one thing the blockchain is good at is "timestamping" events. If I wanted to prove that I had written a certain doc right now for instance I could compute its sha256 and store it in the blockchain. Later that'll be very strong evidence that I actually did have this document at the time. That's the "immutable ledger" feature. You could also have this certified by a notary or held in a bank vault or something. Basically it's Proof of Work (blockchain) vs. Proof of Stake (bank/notary, who would have a lot to lose if caught lying, especially for relatively small amounts of money as we use day-to-day).

dingo_bat 9y ago

I just posted a comment saying "I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities." Will be watching the video.

icelancer 9y ago
I use BTC to purchase prescription drugs that I have a script for but refuse to pay absurd marked-up US prices for. Is that illegal? I suppose it is by the letter of the law. But certainly not by the spirit of it. I am also a notable figure in some circles and do not want my name or credit card information to appear in the ledgers of certain vendors, despite them being legitimate businesses, due to potential records being exposed from hacking. I therefore use BTC and I've used mixing services on top of that. There's plenty of other reasons, but those are my first-world ones. And I'm not even a privacy nut.
sowbug 9y ago
A week ago I bought some beef jerky and a wifi router with Bitcoin at Bic Camera in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Transaction was fast and easy.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  I bought a can of Mountain Dew the other day, with cold hard cash. Transaction was fast, easy and required no computing power.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    I'm really happy for you that you did that! But you started a thread asking whether there were legal uses for Bitcoin, and I answered with one. Why the non sequitur?
_nedR 9y ago
>"I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities." A decentralised currency for world trade that doesn't allow an arbitrarily chosen country to profit by simply printing notes and skimming off the top? A payment system that doesn't pick an arbitrary corporation to rake in all the profits by nickel-and-diming every transaction in an economy?
- simias 9y ago
  That's one side of the coin. I can spin it the other way: bitcoin is a currency that can't be regulated or seized by democratic governments and justice bodies. The entire point of the Bitcoin design is to evade all regulations, the ultimate free market. In many places (in particular in America and the EU) what you call an "arbitrarily chosen country" is effectively a "democratically elected government". It's not perfect of course, there's corruption, there's lobbies but at least there's some amount of accountability. It's also a currency where 75% of all possible coins are currently in circulation and in the hands of a tiny amount of people who are bound to become the new one-percenters (if not 0.01%) if it truly becomes the "world trade currency". With the added benefit to be almost impossible to trace and therefore to tax if the holder is even a little be clever. I'm not saying that it's all white or all black but I'm a bit tired of the cynical libertarian cryptocurrency kool aid. "The current system is flawed, let's break everything and see what happens". And let's make a quick million while we're at it, a new sucker is born every minute.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    But if there is no accountability or regulations the new one-percenters can't become as powerful as the old one-percenters, that rely on the authority of "democratically elected governments".
    - simias 9y ago
      You'll have to give me a more detailed case for that. If we make money harder to tax and regulate the very rich will become less powerful? Won't that just make it even easier to concentrate riches? Given how easy it seems to evade taxes nowadays when you're super rich I can't imagine how it'd be when anybody can basically generate a new untraceable wallet for any transaction. Corruption will never have been so lucrative.
alimbada 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOcXXB48fI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOcXXB48fI I watched this video a few days ago and my wife was sitting next to me on her own laptop distractedly listening to what I was watching and remarked it was a really good easy to understand explanation of blockchain. The part near the end about software verification was really eye opening for me. I'd never considered the use cases of blockchains and the impact they can have outside of crypto-currencies. I've been reading about and investing in crypto-currencies (mainly ETH) for almost a year now. I'm a software developer so seeing the promise in the technology is easier for me than my wife.
- simias 9y ago
  The software verification example is contrived and not at all realistic IMO. >My plane could compare the code generated by its wing with the code stored on ledgers in the other 99 planes. So you don't trust the code of your "wings" but you trust the code that verifies it? And why do you need a decentralized architecture for this? Just ask the plane software vendor to certify a version of your software and use that? What does bringing the blockchain into the mix give you? If you're in a truly decentralized scenario (e.g. a lot of open source software) then what he's describing is basically "web of trust" as implemented in PGP for instance. A lot of software is released with a PGP signature to identify the source. Again, blockchain is pointless here. >If the plane was autonomous it could decide not to take off unless all the other 99 planes gave it the ok. What? Why? How? How could the other planes validate that this plane is not lying about its code checksum? And how is the blockchain involved in any of this? >And it's in contrast with how we'd solve this today. The plane would have to have communicated with a central server, a single point of failure, vulnerable to fault and tampering. This central server would be a closed system, owned by one company making it hard for other devices to inter-operate. Ah, so we're going full FUD now. Clearly distributed and redundant architectures are impossible without the blockchain. Well, I'm dumping my retirement fund into Dogecoin, you've convinced me. More seriously, the one thing the blockchain is good at is "timestamping" events. If I wanted to prove that I had written a certain doc right now for instance I could compute its sha256 and store it in the blockchain. Later that'll be very strong evidence that I actually did have this document at the time. That's the "immutable ledger" feature. You could also have this certified by a notary or held in a bank vault or something. Basically it's Proof of Work (blockchain) vs. Proof of Stake (bank/notary, who would have a lot to lose if caught lying, especially for relatively small amounts of money as we use day-to-day).