It’s not too late to double down and go meta blockchain. A blockchain of blockchain projects. 
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You mean like the monthly $10 service fee for god knows what reason on my Chase checking account?
Buying illegal drugs off the internet?
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I’ve been calling Bitcoin “money replacement by and for the people who don’t understand how money works” for a long time now. 
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Is it just me, or does сointelеgraph have a undeservedly favourable position on google news?
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I think this story was mentioned in a comment in some earlier thread:
OK, i’ts the US government stealing the money, not the bank directly, but the end result is the same.
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Using blockchain for crime is still the weirdest application.
Basically, blockchain is just a public and immutable record of transactions. If I were a criminal, I think I’d prefer records of my crimes be either private or destroyed. But, maybe the professional criminals understand something I don’t 
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I agree. There are some good use cases for blockchains and even then, they are only slightly better than the standard solution. And, as others have mentioned, blockchains of any size large enough to be useful require so much energy that they are terrible for the environment.
There are ways around this, like by situating all of your chain mining near clean and cheap power (but that’s still just a waste since that power could be used to displace coal).
Or, a more sensible route is to change the consensus algorithm from proof of work to something else.
There was a time when I was really excited about blockchain, but then I thought deeply about it and realized, there’s not much there.
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The IRS and DEA seize heckloads of money from individuals’ and businesses’ accounts, often arbitrarily. It’s a form of Civil Asset Forfeiture, and it makes my hair stand on end. Did you know that consistently depositing money in a certain way is called “structuring” and it’s a felony? Because a lot of people didn’t and the feds took billions as a result.
But Bitcoin exchanges are notorious for stealing and being stolen from.
That’s why I’ve got my money in Beanie Babies. When’s the last time you heard of a Beanie Baby heist?
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Doesn’t seem to work out that way in reality, though:"
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It’s been 2 and a half years, so maybe a solution was invented.
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It’s public in the sense that the public keys associated with each transaction are recorded in the blockchain but tying those to actual identities can be quite hard, at least if you go to some moderate inconvenience to generate new keys for most transactions and otherwise shuffle coins around. So it makes all of your transactions public, while making it easier for money launderers to obfuscate their transactions.
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Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
If you fail to see the potential arising from that simple statement, I really can’t help you.
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Hey, the 2010’s needed SOME form of Vaporware. I’m sure the guys peddling these blockchain “disruptions!” have made out like bandits.
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Haha exactly. I’m still waiting for a techbro libertarian collective trading gold in the woods to spool up their own hydroelectric dam and telecommunications infrastructure.
Oh, and then they’ll need an army to prevent the neighboring techbro collective from taking those valuable things. Then they’ll need a way to organize and feed that army. I suppose they need housing so we should build a town. Now we need a way to pave the streets of that town and maintain the infrastructure.
If only there were a way to handle all that sort of stuff.
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So, governments are governments. That means they can seize your bank accounts and, within their bailiwick, nobody can stop them. They can also seize your other stores of value, including bitcoinesque currencies; it’s just a little more work, in some cases.
The idea that governments can be starved to death overnight by untraceable e-cash was a fun launchpad for a few Neal Stephenson scifi projects, but it won’t work that way in practice. If all else fails, they can certainly seize you. Your triply-encrypted bitcoin wallet won’t do you much good then.
I don’t have any quarrel with bitcoins; I’m just saying, the emptiest promise ever made about them was that they somehow acted as a store of liberty (and not just monetary value).
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Never go full blockchain
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IIRC, FDIC is only a buffer against this. If more than 10% of all the money in US banks is withdrawn at once, the banking system starts to collapse.
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And there’s the hole in that particular nit pick. If individuals can do it. Organizations can do it. Organizations like governments and banks.
Super awesome that it can be done with less accountability and oversight. And that restitution is practically impossible though.
Bitcoin was marketed early as being as anonymous as cash but internets. Or even more anonymous than cash. Given how deliberately unclear the concept of a blockchain is I doubt too many folks using cryptocurrency for the crime think it about much more deeply than that.
Even with a clear understanding of how it works. Advocates still commonly argue that there’s anonymity because something something can’t tie a person to the blockchain. Despite numerous demonstrations that it’s pretty simple to do so. A fair bit of it’s popularity as an investment vehicle seems to be driven by tax avoidance too.
It just seems like the smoke and mirrors are inherent to the concept.
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And who was that? 
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That’s what brothers are for.
I’m using blockchain to keep track of my virtual krugerrands.
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