Chain analysis companies whose whole reason for existing is selling exchanges and governments software to track illicit cryptocurrency transactions show that less than 1% of transactions are illicit in nature. So I don’t know how that means the majority of crypto is used for illicit finance.

Semi-legal activities such as donating to wanted individuals, purchasing non regulated non illegal to ship medicine, purchasing digital goods (such as commissioned art) from countries that were banned by SWIFT (Russia).

I’ve already paid a lot of legal things and donated a lot with crypto. It’s pretty much the only way to pay online without giving away your personal info

No single wallet has even close to 1 million Bitcoins. It’s a public block chain and you can find a list of the largest wallets in a website like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

Also, regarding the unfair advantage of the genesis block, Bitcoin’s code was actually written in a way that prevents this balance from being transfered. It’s forever locked in the wallet at this address: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

The coin itself is not a scam.

However, its main usage is to receive payments from scams or any other kind of computer-related crime really.

I’m not using the sewer when I shit my pants. I don’t think you understand pants.

I know that shouting “straw man!” is the first step of trying to deflect from being wrong on the Internet… But if you’re going to do it, at least know what a straw man is.

My argument is that “Infrastructure” != “anyone can do it”.

Infrastructure is something that benefits and maintains the general public. Bitcoin benefits a handful of cryptobros, billionaires… and most importantly ransomware rings.

Putting significant energy into campaigning against it? Sure. But what’s silly about saying “this is a stupid idea and shouldn’t happen”?

The swings were bigger when the market cap was smaller, this is usually the case. The market cap of the yen is much bigger still.

Turkey’s currency dropped 83% in the last 5 years and 94% in 10 years (per USD). And by the way: It dropped and did not rise the same amount ever again…

Why can’t we just agree that different people might have different views whether it’s useful for them?

Is it more stable compared to USD? No. Is it more stable compared to dozens of other currencies? Yes.

I think, there are very good arguments against BTC, for example the energy consunption… But whether it’s too risky for you or not… That’s highly subjective IMO. There is no country on this planet with only BTC as official currency. So, no one is forced to hold 100% of their total money in BTC.

How wasteful!

Anyhow, today I’m going to resume using a currency backed by oil and nukes, which encourages consumption on purpose. I will then either exploit workers by investing in a for-profit business, or get poorer.

But someday, in the future, economics will work the way I expect them to. That’s when I’ll switch to something better!

How I understand it is:

• You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
• The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
• You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
• The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
• You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
• But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
• And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
• The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.

I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.

Now, as for this bit:

if Taler can change hands during said “link”.

That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.

So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.

Thank you for being honest about being pro-tax-evasion and pro-money-laundering.

Yeah, I basically just do Monero, and I use it as a spend account and use it anywhere it’s accepted. I don’t invest in any cryptocurrencies because I don’t think cryptocurrencies have positive expected return (it’s all hype), so I keep the amount of crypto I have small.