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And what could be better for "those living under corrupt regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?

jnwatson 5y ago
That’s the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just surviving, because they don’t have a local reliable currency.
- acdha 5y ago
  Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?
  - peterholcomb 5y ago
    I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.
steelstraw 5y ago
Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions conducted in 2021 https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-report-63fb9757-d1c3-4103-82bd-7b68692f9f9c.html https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...
- MBCook 5y ago
  A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say. You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.
- camdat 5y ago
  The source for this article is a "study" from Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%. Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers. [0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/ https://bitpay.com/stats/
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    You can't assume gift cards are all money laundering. What an absurdly inflammatory and baseless allegation. The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.
    - gr__or 5y ago
      https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago

That’s the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just surviving, because they don’t have a local reliable currency.

acdha 5y ago
Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?
- peterholcomb 5y ago
  I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.
  - acdha 5y ago
    It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.

steelstraw 5y ago

Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions conducted in 2021 https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-report-63fb9757-d1c3-4103-82bd-7b68692f9f9c.html https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...

MBCook 5y ago
A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say. You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.
camdat 5y ago
The source for this article is a "study" from Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%. Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers. [0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/ https://bitpay.com/stats/
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  You can't assume gift cards are all money laundering. What an absurdly inflammatory and baseless allegation. The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.
  - gr__or 5y ago
    https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago