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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

First thing that came to mind. This is one way bitcoin helps people; when banks start refusing to allow you to use your money how you want.

Remember when wikileaks couldn't get donations because "pressure" was put on paypal, mastercard & visa not to process those payments? Bitcoin.

Wanna donate to the piratebay? Anonymous? ...bitcoin.

Megacorps wanna donate to a political campaign without being found out later on? ....bitcoin.

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It's really important to understand that bitcoin is not anonymous by default, and it might well be less anonymous than cash by default. I know there are solutions to anonymizing BTC, but for the average person who bought some BTC from a service online and used it to send a transaction to a political campaign or TPB or wherever, I wouldn't call it any more anonymous than paypal.

Exactly right but these buyers & sellers don't care about anonymity too much. It is the banks who are worried.

If governments were really devious they would replace their cash with a non-anonymous cryptocurrency like BitCoins. That would make it hate for the underground economy to avoid the police or taxation.

The services online aren't broadcasting the names of the people using their addresses- so it's basically anonymous to the common person.

It's true that without using a mixer (aka "money launderer") Big Government could seize the service to get your name... but what about https://localbitcoins.com/ ?

Yea, put your companies capital into a volatile, non-FDIC insured, commonly robbed medium. Genius.

When the subject at hand is about companies that don't have an option?

I don't see what problem bitcoin solves for these businesses. The first example in the article is having to take $51,000 in cash to pay the company's taxes to the state. Bitcoin does not solve this in any fashion. I really struggle to find the problem that bitcoin solves in this situation.

"Commonly robbed" is an exaggeration.

That's the beauty of it - you don't need to use bitcoin to store your capital. Just use it to get money from your customers to a hard-currency account, which I would guess is easier with BTC than with large quantities of physical cash.

There's risk in the movement of a day's cash flow by BTC, but probably not much higher than the risk of transferring cash in your personal car.

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