This sounds disingenuous. Not every fan of Bitcoin supports fraud, drug trafficking.. etc. The dollar is used for such bad activities, should we label everyone that loves the dollar as a supporter of fraud and drugs?
1. Bitcoin (crypto) users who (only) have BC because they hate fiat money
2. Users who have BC because they need it for illegal gains
3. Opportunistic investors
4. Web3ers
I have the unsubstantiated feeling that 1 is overstated.
This category is way larger than people in well-banked Western circles realise. Bitcoin (crypto) is one of the easiest ways for people affected by capital controls or sanctions (on the financial institutions they use, or the country they were unlucky enough to be born in) to freely move their (legally earned, and taxed) money across borders.
Since one of the countries with strict capital controls is China, and one of the countries affected by sanctions is Russia, the scale of this usage of crypto is huge.
I'm not assigning a moral value to this. I'm just commenting that law avoidance is law avoidance, even if you really really want or need to do it.
Tokens are useless in comparison to monay for almost any activity, except for law avoidance. For this task they are amazing.
Russia is currently fighting a war of aggression, applying controls on the flow of money in or out of there is one way in which the war machine can be starved.
Did the bitcoiners forget about paper bills?
> the 80% is normal hard working people who don't like hard working
Another way to look at it is that 80% of Bitcoiners don’t like the value of their hard work to be continuously debased at a rate of 2-8+% year after year or being subjected to the whims of the Fed’s money printer which recently expanded the entire money supply by over 40% then claimed it wouldn’t drive inflation before claiming that inflation was temporary.
2. Hold Bitcoin for illegal uses, probably a small minority as there are better options such as Monero for illegal uses
3. Probably a majority of Bitcoiners are opportunistic investors. Why is that bad?
4. Web3ers, a minority of Bitcoiners. You are thinking of altcoins. (Yes Ordinals on Bitcoin are now a thing and are controversial in the Bitcoin community, but most Bitcoiners are hard money proponents who are not interested in NFTs)
I respect people who believe money should be uncensorable. But at least own that view and the implications, instead of all of this fiat whataboutism.
But it as limits built in - it has to physically transfer hands, true anonymity is difficult, and is practically limited in its scale (moving and then using $1,000,000 in cash is logistically less practical than using a wire transfer).
Ie. it is mighty difficult to use cash for ransomware attacks, and it is not that simple to get paid in cash for a kidnapping (eg. the case of the guys who kidnapped a schoolbus, but while working out how to collect their ransom, the kids escaped.)
Why? That is just another way of saying moneyed interests should be above the rule of law. What could possibly be respectable about a view this odious?
Let's take an experiment. Instead of "I should be free to send money to anyone anywhere", we'll replace money with a car.
"I should be free to drive my car anywhere, anytime". Sounds superficially like a reasonable proposition even? But in fact we have lots of rules that control who can drive a car, where, under what intoxication. There are driver's licenses, traffic signs, road police... Ultimately a judge will put you in jail if you exercise your freedom to drive outside of society's rules.
Now imagine someone using the pseudonym Suzuki Toyotamoto invents a car made out of floating jello with an engine that runs on nuclear waste. Many engineers will marvel at the ingenuity of the design. Some people start building their own jello blobs and driving them off-road without a license. The law says nothing explicitly about transportation inside floating jello. Eventually people take their floating jello vehicles to roads and get fined. (The jello moves barely at walking speed and drips radioactive sludge.) Outrage blows up in the floating jello community. Do the old rules apply to them? Will the whole world switch over to floating jello? (These questions may seem very important to those versed in the world of Suzuki Toyotamoto's floating jello, but most people just don't care and will happily keep using their regular cars instead of sitting in slime powered by radioactive waste.)
