I saw you make that claim but that's too vague to evaluate whereas what Nagle described has been well covered for many years and even the Bitcoin salespeople rarely argue that it's commonplace. Even with the extra two paragraphs you added later there's no way to know what this meant, what fraction of the total Bitcoin usage it accounted for, etc.
> These comments never mention the continual reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability.
This is incorrect, and the need for the counterfactual narrative is telling: this comes up frequently and it's usually mentioned in the context of the larger economy. Nobody says that the U.S. dollar isn't used by criminals but it's trivially easy to show enormous amounts of real, non-criminal economic activity — nobody thinks, say, drug cartels are tiny but there's no serious argument that they're anywhere near a majority of the legal economy. If you want to address this claim, try highlighting examples of real economic activity using Bitcoin — real businesses which are not selling Bitcoin. If USD (or just Visa/Mastercard, Paypal, etc.) activity suddenly halted, a ton of people would be unable to engage in their daily business — can you provide any examples of similar Bitcoin dependencies?
> Younger technologists have considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.
I agree that the landscape isn't as good as it used to be but I don't think it's helpful to steer people into false hopes, either. Bitcoin has an inherent conflict of interest built-in since all of the people who've poured money into it for the last decade will have to write that off if they can't find buyers. That lack of utility is the real problem and calling it FUD won't solve it.