[Cryptography] playing lawyer, Incentive Politics

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 8:25 PM Erik <erik at erikgranger.name> wrote:

> Do you support similar policies against cash, considering it is the most
> commonly used criminal currency?
> -- Sent from /e/ Mail.
>

That is not the correct comparison.

There is absolutely no measurable legitimate commerce that uses BitCoin or
any other pseudo-currency. None, zip, zilch, nada. The online merchants who
would let people pay with Bitcoin never really used it, they just had an
payment provider that would immediately convert BTC to cash and virtually
all of those have quietly dropped it.

BTC is useless as a payment transmission medium: It is slow, it is
hilariously expensive, it cannot be reversed in the case of fraud on the
receiver's part.

And no, enthusiasts don't get to say 'but we gonna fix it' fifteen years
later. You have to fix the basics long before the operators of the largest
exchanges start going on trial for $50 billion ponzi frauds. Yesterday,
Binance just stole all the actual cash held by their customers, you can
redeem money from the account by converting to Tether and try to find
somewhere will buy it.


All of these issues are requirements that anyone proposing a new form of
currency based on cryptography have to solve BEFORE they start operating.
Hal was in a hurry because he had just got his terminal diagnosis when he
launched BTC. He was in so much of a hurry, he couldn't wait 7 months for
the Haber Stornetta blockchain patent to expire.


The question that should be asked is whether ransomware would be profitable
without the pseudocurrencies providing finality to the extortion payments.
Answer to that is no.

Cash is used in crime but cash doesn't scale. The largest bills in most
countries are worth $500 or less, in the US it's $100 or less. A briefcase
full of cash is only a few tens of thousands of dollars. Drug dealers
routinely put money into washing machines and launder it to save weight on
a plane.

This is not by accident, it is by design. One of the main ways in which
governments have limited the operations of terrorism and organized crime is
by making it really difficult for them to move money around.

You may object to that on ideological grounds, I object to the murders, the
extortions, the thefts that the world of unregulated crypto-currencies has
created.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20231018/cfab8d33/attachment.htm>