“Money doesn’t talk - it swears.” - Bob Dylan
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I used my US bank account to get Euros from an ATM last week and paid 6% over the exchange rate for the privilege of doing so, plus bank fees on both ends. Settling a small a debt with a friend in Hong Kong using Bitcoin required ~0.5% for the network fee.
Bitcoin is a neutral medium. The arguments for and against cryptocurrency apply to encryption as a whole, with arguments against suggesting a panopticon is required to maintain society.
I support financial regulation, but I also support private transactions, and feel that focusing on one medium for illegal activity, baseless idiotic speculation, and tax evasion, out of thousands, is misguided and won’t stop those frauds from occurring.
Banning crypto will work about as well as banning drugs. Even though there are legitimate arguments against cryptocurrencies, private exchange is too foundational to the human experience to eliminate it.
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Maybe, but it is, more or less, the basis for Citizens United: money is speech.
Money is not speech; your usage of either the legal coin of the realm or a shady ficticious instrument is not a matter of personal expression but collective economic policy. Citizens United is a) wrong and b) inapplicable.
Therapy is not, usually, illegal.
Cash is also used for illegal activity and tax evasion. Neither needs to be. Currency in general is used for speculation - lots of people looking to make money guessing right on Brexit these days.
The person above noted they paid for therapy with Bitcoin for funsies as a test-drive, not because they had to, and they probably wasted rather a lot of the therapist’s time out of that curiosity. And yes, cash is used for tax evasion and criminal activity, but it’s also used for commerce; I am asking if there is any purpose to Bitcoin BESIDES tax evasion and criminal activity. Also, financial speculation is legal Bingo mixed with legal three-card-monte, so citing bad law as precedent doesn’t move the needle on my concerns.
What would you ban, exactly? Bartering in general?
Bitcoin specifically, and any form of payment that has Tax evasion built into it as feature #1. I’m not crazy about barter, but it’s not part of large-scale schemes, scams and frauds like Bitcoin.
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It is not solely for illegal activity, baseless idiotic speculation, or tax evasion. It is a proof of concept. Like a stupid little toy such as a Cartesian Diver.
You’re not going to get rational answers, because the ones that exist (ie. “Bitcoins are a great way to separate fools from their money”, “Bitcoins are handy for organized crime or corrupt oligarchs to move money around”, “Bitcoins can be used to buy heinous shit from shady markets”, etc.) aren’t ones that people supporting bitcoins don’t want to spread around; and the ones they do want to make public aren’t especially rational.
It’s a money replacement by and for the people who don’t understand what money is and why it works.
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That’s an argument for using a better bank, not for using a shady illegal make-em-up argument.
“The arguments for and against cryptocurrency apply to encryption as a whole, with arguments against suggesting a panopticon is required to maintain society.”
A panopticon is not required to maintain society, but some transparency and openness is. Or, rather, you may say you don’t want society up in your business, but your business affects society.
“Banning Crypto will work about as well as banning drugs.”
What a coincidence; using crypto currencies probably work out as well as using drugs.
These are arguments, but they are not good ones.
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So the billions of unbanked and underbanked people can transact with each other?
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I was arguing with my friend the other day who was trying to tell me how bacterially dirty typical currency is. I told him it was probably no worse than the standard door knob. So he made a bet with me: “Munch on this quarter for 30 seconds, and I’ll give you $20”.
I did just that and I made $20 because I Bitcoin.
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If you don’t have access to a bank, try harder. They’re not hidden under bridges and guarded by riddle-trolls.
Again, not an answer. Not really. Because if you think everyone using Bitcoin is doing so because they live in a Financial Services dessert, with no banks or ATM’s for miles, then that’s nuts.
To be fair, is that really who is using bitcoin? The underbanked? I think they’re more likely to depend on either those green dot cards (reloadable debit cards), or if they are outside the developed world, non-profits that do microbanking/loaning (if they have access).
Not having access to a bank, much like not having access to any number of things many of us take for granted (grocery stores for instance) is usually not a “try harder” issue, it’s usually a racism/classism/public infrastructure issue. That’s seriously getting into “stop being poor” territory there. How about we not assume that people who have little access to banking are simply too lazy and instead acknowledge are impacted by all sorts of factors that are outside of their control.
None the less, I’d guess that they are not the primary users of bitcoin. If that’s one of the intent of bitcoin, I don’t think it’s doing what it’s meant to do. It seems to me like an underground form of currency that is more often than not being used by either anti-government types, criminals, or state actors for various and sundry reasons (some of which are likely legit, others not so much).
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Well, I think this applies here:
Keep Funsies legal!!
Seriously, are you looking for a case where bitcoin is the only option? That would be a hard bar for cash to meet. Or American Express. Or Visa. Or USD for that matter.
Well, right. But what does that mean? Possession of the algorithm? Possession of certain numbers? Or transfer of numbers between individuals?
Or do you mean literally something called bitcoin, which can be quickly replaced by bytecoin and fbcoin etc etc etc.
I just can’t get my head around what the crime would be, other than not paying taxes, and we already have those laws. If I trade you something of value for something of value, we still, legally, have to pay sales tax on the transaction, even if no one actually does.
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You know, @DeclanMcManus, so far, in response to your question about non-illegal uses for Bitcoin, I’ve seen several, ranging from trivial (it’s fun) to significant (avoiding bank fees on international transcations).
Your response is to find a better bank, but why? If we have a perfectly good and legal alternative method to transfer wealth (and BitCoin is legal, your question is why it is legal), why not use it?
So, I turn your question back on you:
Why ban Bitcoin?
And, I’ll say upfront, that your answer has to not apply to other financial instruments.
If the only answer is that is that it is not backed by a government, that’s fair, but unconvincing to me. If you were going to pay me in BitCoin or Zimbabwean backed dollars, I’d go for Bitcoin. That might even be true for Argentinian dollars too.
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Because it has some potentially fun uses and interesting ideas, but it seems solely designed to support and help anti-societal illegal activity, and its lack of transparency is a potential carnival of theft, fraud, crime and lawlessness. And I don’t like it when people think the rules that built our roads, schools and courts don’t apply to them.
It’s not ‘Stop being poor.’ It’s ‘Stop being callow, incurious, unmotivated and in a morass of learned helplessness.’ My politics are left as hell, but I also think that if you stand around with your jaw open and don’t do the work and the research, that’s on you.
Your bank, in the 21st century is as close as your phone. And most people have those.
Again, I don’t want to say and would never say ‘Stop being poor’; there are so many institutional, structural inequitable mechanisms in capitalism that, yes, once you start losing it’s hard to get back to even. But libraries are free, and so is figuring things out.
Legitimate questions. I’m not sure we have all the answers yet.
It’s hard to know exactly what the future holds for humanity, economics, democracy, etc. I’m keeping an open mind about cryptocurrencies for now, even though I bristle at how they are popular with Libertarians, criminals and speculators.
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I prefer Freicoin if there’s to be any kind of digital currency. It has a built in demurrage fee. It’s no surprise the bitcoin speculators are avoiding it. 
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Oh! Ban the rich! I’m on board with that! 
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Your definition of “left as hell” is profoundly different than mine.
The mass of poor people aren’t poor, with bad credit, and restricted access to financial instruments, because they’re lazy.
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This is a real issue, about access to banking. This is not a “lazy” issue. There are plenty of poor, working class communities with NO BANKS nearby, both rural and urban communities.
YOU TELL THAT WORKING CLASS, SINGLE MOM WORKING 3 JOBS! /s
While it’s true that mobile banking has opened up new ways for people to have access to banks, you’re also ignoring financial access to banking, in some cases making predatory banking the only option for many people. There is probably a reason why wellsfargo is one of the biggest banks, and that’s because they offered greater access while also screwing over people without the means of fighting back.
But I’m sure you can let the working poor use your bootstraps to pull themselves up by…
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*urge to post mutual banking memes rising*
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