Hacker News Reader

Cocaine is a highly inelastic good. Bitcoin is highly elastic. It's trivial to ban goods with elastic demand.

> Cocaine is a highly inelastic good. Bitcoin is highly elastic. It's trivial to ban goods with elastic demand.

What do people use Bitcoin for? Buying drugs online! If the demand for drugs is inelastic, then presumably the demand for a way to buy them online is somewhat inelastic too?

I would think that BTC is not used only for buying drugs. If my numbers are correct daily BTC transaction volume is 290K or 15B€ or 750 tones of cocaine at 20€/g. Thats a lot of cocaine. In 2018 its estimayed that worldwide 1.7k tones were produced totally.

This assumes that the end users buy their cocaine straight from the big drug kingpin. These drugs are paid for many times.

That and there's more than cocaine out there on the darkweb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com