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Comment by agotterer | Hacker News Reader

I also find it strange. The same thing could be said of airplanes, slow cookers, and propane tanks.

There are harmful, fringe, uses of those items but the vast majority of the use-cases fit a slow cooker aren’t harmful. The same cannot be said of bitcoin, where the primary use-case is facilitating nefarious business.

For better it worse, the primary use case of Bitcoin is as a store of value. I find it misleading to tell people that the “primary use-case is facilitating nefarious business”. Do you have some data to back up a statement which says that the vast majority of Bitcoin is used in that way? I’m not suggesting there aren’t bad actors out there. But there are plenty of bad actors who deal in fiat as well. But this was the point I was trying to make. The nefarious actors are an edge case.

Bitcoin wouldn't function as a store of value if it didn't have an underlying use case. This is true of all stores of value - with gold it's shiny and useful, with cash you can pay taxes, with a home you can live in it, etc.

In Bitcoin that use case is wealth transfer that is uninhibited by law.

That essentially makes it kind of like an index tracker for the underground economy.

Something is valuable because someone else also believes it has value. Have you considered that people put their money in Bitcoin to avoid it being stolen by nefarious/oppressive governments or to hedge against inflation or as speculative investment that Bitcoin will offer additional use cases in the future? Those all seem like legitimate use cases to me.

I don't disagree that it's an underground economy, but that's only because it hasn't hit the mainstream. But being underground doesn't necessarily mean nefarious or illegal. Those bad actors definitely exist in the Bitcoin economy and all other economies. But without some data I'm having trouble coming around to the idea that the majority of Bitcoin is used for illegal purposes.

I have considered that. Nonetheless, the people who try the hardest to get money out of oppressive countries are typically the corrupt - they know that their rackets have an end date and they want an exit strategy when that happens. We shouldn't kid ourselves - this is who we are really helping here. It's the same people who buy luxury apartments in New York and London and leave them empty just in case.

I find it hard to believe that anything beyond a small minority of transactions are the "good kind of underground transaction".

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