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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

Why distinguish between legal and illegal transactions? I guess the assumption is that value grounded in illegal transactions is inherently volatile due to the risk of it getting shut down?

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Because the value illegal actors find in Bitcoin isn't in its role as a currency, but rather in its role as an anonymous method to globally transfer wealth.

Even if millions of people use Bitcoin for that use case, it doesn't mean Bitcoin will ever have staying power for the "reserve currency" use case.

The term for "a method to transfer wealth" is "currency". (And in fact, "currency" is used metaphorically to indicate methods of transferring anything at all.)

There's a large difference between a currency being used for anonymity and a currency being used for stability and trust (hence the use of "reserve" vs. "anonymous" in my post — I omitted "reserve" in the first sentence).

Hm? Currencies are primarily used as a means to store and exchange value. The other things are secondary features that you may use to do things like pick between two currencies.

Y'all are getting hung up on insisting that Bitcoin is a currency, which nobody is arguing. There are important differences in the use cases that make a currency valuable to society, though. And Bitcoin is a far cry from demonstrating its value beyond the anonymous use case (or speculator use case). It is not stable or trustworthy yet, and will not be used as a reserve currency until making huge gains in both areas.

> people that make their money in the underworld still need money that can buy regular things, and so whatever is used to track exchange still needs to be pegged to dollars or whatever

I guess the implication is that "illegal stuff" isn't a large enough market to cover people's general needs.

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