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> And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than mon

> And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin. Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. ... I suspect Krugman is being deliberately dishonest here. The use case is censorship-resistant money. Not just money laundering, but any use of money outside national jurisdiction. This includes routing around capital controls, civil asset forfeiture threats, and increasingly draconian financial surveillance. Not just in developing countries and in dictatorships, but in western-style democracies. It's understandable that the privileged like Krugman hate this idea. It's not unlike thinking that the Internet's effect on the economy will be no greater than the fax machine. Krugman wasn't the target user then and he isn't now.

superchroma 4y ago
Except it isn't because the government watches the endpoints. You can't get serious money in and out of crypto without the government knowing because all exchanges have to comply with KYC. On top of that, it can't be effectively used for breaking the law as you propose because it's traceable via the ledger. It's a failure on all counts.
- allears 4y ago
  Oh, but it can still be used for breaking the law if you keep a low profile. Tracing requires enough resources that it's only done on suspicion of serious crime. I can order small personal quantities of shrooms from Canada, although they're illegal where I live, by using bitcoin, and I have no fear of being traced.
- argella 4y ago
  Coinjoin
- lawn 4y ago
  Monero isn't traceable on the ledger, so the most the government can know is that you buy and sell things via exchanges.