amazing fact [159 countries]
Ya but your amps eat more idle current than half of those countries... Throwing in all the countries that basically don't use electricity makes it less impressive. Greenland? It's a country that has a population of a large town.
we all know why this currency was developed. Plain and simple...to hide shady or crooked money.
Not true at all. Considering it was developed to stop the possibility of double spending, it is actually to fight crooked institutional money. It eliminates the need for 3rd parties, known as clearing houses. By doing that it creates something usable by everyone for true value movement, independent of crooked "authority".
Bitcoin was invented to launder money and make payments that would otherwise be risky because they are against the law. It encourages corruption, which is at the very heart of wealth inequality and the unfair treatment of our fellow human beings.
It turns out that many transactions are NOT anonymous, which is a failing of Bitcoin but supporters turn that around and tell you it's a feature.
But hey, the promise of a quick buck is hard to resist especially when you feel like you don't currently have enough. I'll continue to invest in myself and my own business, I believe in it and what I want to do.
Dave you've fallen victim to the mass confusion on the subject. Here is the section from the white paper:
The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the
parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly
precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in
another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending
an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is
similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of
individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.
As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them
from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input
transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk
is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to
the same owner.
It is meant for increased privacy, but not being anonymous. It's well known that to be completely anonymous you can't have the public knowing how much was transfered, along with other features. Countless people took this as meaning untraceable, but that was an error on their part. At no point is that claim made. And at no point does anyone believe stocks are untraceable. The point is increased privacy so that not everyone in the world can easily just look at it.
I don't see the problem, if you aren't suspect then why would there be any need to put you under the lens? Innocent until proven guilty is something I believe in.
Can any of you tell us how you would launder money with it? Did you know you have to show federal ID at every Bitcoin ATM? Coinbase is considerably more secure than your bank account... It's pretty damn hard. Even if you manage to transfer value with it for that purpose, how did you buy it? how are they going to sell it? In order for laundered money to have use... I'm sure you see my point.
And the reality is the amount of money that could be used for "illicit" activity, is petty compared to the truly big money launderers found in the institutional systems. It's hard for me to really understand why any of you would give a rat's ass about a few hundred dollars or maybe at absolute best a few thousand, going unnoticed... (which requires being cash to start with) For me it's the millions and billions that are bothersome, the money made off of everyone's backs, that is bothersome when it comes to illegal activity.
Fiat is still king for illicit activity, by an absolutely massive margin that makes cryptos look like a grain of sand on a beach... but I don't see anyone ranting and raving about it.
While maybe I should try to explain better about the value in Bitcoin, I don't really think there is much point to anyone that doesn't want to hear it (so they won't).
