Because they see value in it.

The whole article goes on to paint every single bitcoin user as a criminal of some sort while completely ignoring the fact that the title itself is a glaring contradiction of the content.

Furthermore, a lot of bitcoin criticism comes from very US centric viewpoints. Consumer protection in the US (for the most part..) is miles ahead of many other places in the world. You can return stuff after 30 days and in some cases even after using things! On the flip side, my CC was fraudulently charged by Greenpeace a few months ago in India and I would've had to jump through some serious hoops (including cancelling my credit card) to lodge a case to recover my money. Considering the amount was small, I decided to just forget about it. But I still pay the 3% charge built into prices that are 'credit card friendly'.

Not sure if the article is just trolling because it seems heavy on the criticism but quotes other critics as citations. (eg. Stross)

One thing I love about bitcoin is that a lot of folks seem to be very passionate about it. There's some serious fanboyism and there are some serious haters. Personally, I like bitcoin but I don't feel polarized by it the way some people do. I can see why fanboys are excited about it but I fail to understand why the haters are so against it. This is like Mac vs PC or Nintendo vs Sega kind of stuff all over again.

I honestly want to hear from people who have actually been burnt by it. (MtGox victims ?) Did they turn into haters ? Or what happened there ?

The only cases I know of MtGox victims (guys demonstrating outside the Gox office in Japan) seemed to indicate that they clearly blamed Mark Karpeles/Gox and not bitcoin in general. So why are the Gox victim sympathizers so keen to blame bitcoin ?

So let's imagine a world where this happens. Most vendors shut down operations, people dump their coins and the price of Bitcoin crashes and stabilizes at some sub-dollar amount. Now, only criminals make use of Bitcoin.

Well, nothing has changed. Consumers of drugs purchase Bitcoins for use on Silkroad-esque sites. Sellers accept Bitcoin payment for drugs and then sell the coins back to other individuals wishing to purchase drugs.

The use of Bitcoin to facilitate illegal activities does not require mass adoption. As long as there are enough people participating in illegal activities to keep exchanges liquid, nothing will change.

In short, his solution accomplishes nothing. It doesn't reduce Bitcoin's ability to facilitate illegal activities at all.

I think there may be a different reason for the connection between $100 bills and cocaine, which has nothing to do with how they are paid for.

There's one - or two - more legitimate case for bitcoin I can see - and strangely enough I don't see bitcoin advocates arguing for them: buying embarrassing things online, or donating anonymously to causes you might not want to admit your support for in public

The main reason most people ever got to hear about Bitcoin in the first place was that it was, for a while, the only way to donate money to Wikileaks, after PayPal and the credit card companies cut them off. I know this was more than a year ago and time moves faster on the internet, but has this been forgotten already?

[1] The same goes for cash - well, in some cases it's even more trackable than cash.

[2] I tend to find credit cards disgusting - people get in all kinds of debts that they can't pay back. I prefer debit cards & don't own a CC. The only advantage is guarantee's that credit card companies offer. But what tells you a company can't introduce the same for Bitcoin?

[3] Isn't it kind of the same as a debit card? If you put your monthly allowance, or weekly allowance in your pay wallet, what's the problem? If you have a huge amount of bitcoins in 1 address that's made for paying people & isn't in cold storage, you are doing it wrong. Same with regular cash.

[4] If you lose your wallet, you can still have a password on it. If you know you've lost your wallet, find the backup at home of your wallet private keys and move the bitcoins to a different address - that means that when you lose your wallet, you don't automatically lose your cash...

[5] Exactly. You can debate if it's bad or good - but it does protect the seller against chargebacks.

[7] That's great though right? Bitcoin wasn't designed for criminals only. Sure, it has certain advantages for criminals. But it has a lot of other pros too. International transactions take days compared to bitcoin transactions, and are a hell of a lot cheaper too.

You could say, "I don't care, I can issue a chargeback for fraudulent transactions made with my card", but the $190 billion per year that merchants lose due to fraud doesn't come from thin air, it comes from your pocket as higher prices.

I can understand not defending Bitcoin, but for the life of me I can't understand people who defend a broken pull system like CCs, and right now Bitcoin is the only push system working internationally that doesn't take days and huge fees to transfer.

And how much has been lost to fraud in the Bitcoin system? How do those numbers compare as a proportion of transactions? CCs are not perfect, but the costs of Bitcoin's irreversible transactions are bigger, and rather than everyone paying a small percentage fee, Bitcoin fraud wipes out businesses and even individuals.

Because a deflationary economy means in the long term you don't have to worry about inflation eroding the value of your accumulated donations which means less participation in potentially morally questionable[0] endowment management practices.

You could claim that accepting bitcoin facilitates an economy that has morally questionable elements, too, but that is also true for dollars.

[0] for example, investing in stocks which are of companies that run counter to the purpose of your organization, having investments in countries that engage in political practices that are questionable (e.g. apartheid), or just plain old subjecting your donor's funds to risk (which they may not want).

Stross' article says:

> Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached.

I disagree. Bitcoin was always supposed to be an experiment. Can we stop inserting political and economic agenda into everything? Bitcoin has never claimed to be the savior of mankind. It may succeed, it may fail. Can't people stop speculating about it? And a lot of it isn't mere speculation: it's extremely adamant positions on whether bitcoin will/should fail or flourish.

Why don't we just wait and see what happens instead of fabricating prophecies? All of this is really tiring me out. I don't think I'm the only one.

I don't like Bitcoins and I don't own any, but even I can see why there might be people reluctant to rush headlong into the glorious, corporate-mediated digital future that the author claims is making cash obsolete. I cherish the option to pay for things in cash. I understand why "upstanding citizens" might cherish the option to carry out transactions using Bitcoins.

I guess if you trust bitcoin more than the combination of the other two it makes sense.

What fascinates me is the number of people who answer that question with a definitive "NO!", some even going as far as this guy with a "NO AND YOU SHOULDN'T TOO OR YOU'RE A CRIMINAL AND I'M GOING TO DO EVERYTHING I CAN TO STOP YOU!"

Yet when you read their justification for their absolutist position, it's always based on flaws in today's systems and services, or a naive tacit assumption that every problem must be solved with an automated solution baked into the protocol, or a strawman belief that just because some Bitcoin supporters think it should replace cash that that is the only possibility worth discusing.

Our present banking system - including regulatory oversight - did not develop in 5 years, so why do people expect the decentralised cryptocurrency environment to be any different?

I have no idea if Bitcoin-based systems will become a material part of our civilization's future. Were I to guess, I think the technology is novel and interesting enough that something useful will come out of it.

But I really don't understand people who seem to claim it definitely will or won't 'go big' - why don't they just sit back and see, or participate, and phrase their beliefs more conservatively with a good dose of "I don't know but I think ... because ..."?

What's with all the prophets running around?

I don't trust bitcoin exchanges not to be hacked. Maybe the currency itself. I don't trust there not to be bugs in the systems yet. Some governments are trying to ban the use of it. Whats to say your government will not be next? If it gets banned, I assume the value of any bitcoins you own will go down.

Mt .Gox just declared bankruptcy. If it was a normal currency, then you would have some sort of guarantee (in the UK anyway) so that at least some of your money is protected. Do the people that had bitcoins there have any of that protection?

Any scenario in which "they" started "messing" with our money would probably either end in a pitchforks-foodcans-and-ammo situation or already be in the context of a major catastrophy such as war.

What I'm trying to say is that a scenario in which you can't trust the banks and the government with your money but the rest of the economy is still fine is rather unlikely.

Its not very convincing, except to those already convinced. It compiles trite phrases you can remember and regurgitate at a cocktail party or wherever (do they even still have cocktail parties?) and sound smart. If you like to rant, then here's plenty of material for you.

But reading it, as a person neutral to cryptocurrency, I'm unconvinced, even slightly. The guy doesn't like bitcoin, I get that. But the arguments are so tangential (its slower than cash in person? Until I get an app I guess) I smell a rat: he's got nuthin.

If I wanted to criticize cryptocurrency with hard facts, I'd use this one: it burns energy (and carbon credits) for imaginary points. I'd call it cynical - burn the ecosphere because you don't trust anybody to be an issuing agent for your currency. I've never heard that one promoted in an essay, and I'd like to.

2) I accept bitcoin as payment for web development freelance services (specifically WebGL/3D development). I do it because, I'm not troubled by the exchange risk, and because the only way that people can pay otherwise is wire transfers from their bank. These are costly, slow, and increasingly, they fail. There's many reasons why they fail, but they basically boil down to that banks suck. And don't even think that PayPal would be better. Conducting business trough paypal is basically, much more risky than being exposed to bitcoins volatility.

It's extremely refreshing to send out an invoice, and receive payment within seconds, and have it securely confirmed, irreversibly within an hour.

And I personally don't use Bitcoins nor do I intend to use them in the nearest future.

This is pretty stupid.

This was the genius of offering "cashback" when doing a card transaction at somewhere like a supermarket - it is a real win-win - the customer gets cash they might need for something and the supermarket reduces the amount of cash they have to deal with.

I would think the average criminal would be smart enough to obfuscate their tracks, but right now I think the only reason they use bitcoins is because their lack of ubiquity allows them some degree of anonymity. If they had to do their grocery shopping in bitcoin, they'd be doing their criminal activities in something else.

Actually, accepting bitcoin right now will give you a huge advantage - especially because your competitor probably doesn't and it's a pretty big market.

"You can't ban dollars, you'd have to make governments illegal!" is the all-too-frequent reply to anarchocapitalists who advocate for the separation of state and economy. And it's true, more-or-less; while we can prosecute corrupt politicians, there's little we can do to get rid of political structures that are inherently problematic.

What I don't get, though, is why any upstanding citizen would want to help them out.

Like any government-backed money instrument, dollars are created through a system that starts with federalized debt; the usual economic cycle is that the treasury issues a note (realistically an unbounded proposition in spite of 'debt ceilings), and exchanges them with a rich person or institutional investor seeking a percentage return. This note is then exchanged with the Federal Reserve bank, which in turn instructs the treasury to print up dollar bills to satisfy this debt (with interest).

The one unique twist is that, being purely a political instrument, there is no physical limit to this process and because overprinting money devalues savings of the poor (and typically only bankers and the rich have impactful access to the yield-bearing interest) the only thing limiting total economic collapse is how effectively the government can hoodwink the populace into thinking that spending is good for them - so the poor are thrown peanuts in terms of token social programmes while other rich people like contractors and so forth (most recently big pharma and healthcare sector) really get the mother lode in spending (and bankers and fund managers make away with the interest)... But in the united states, a full 50% or so percent goes to the "defense" department and the "defense industry" (read: "war" department and "warmaking industry").

Dollars are, as Smedley Butler described, are, a currency designed to facilitate the military industrial complex. When a guy walks into a place of business and uses cash (or really any dollar-backed financial instrument, such as a credit card or checks), ultimately, 50% of the debt that was used to bring that dollar into existence went to finance a sprawling imperial organization with thugs stationed in 180-odd countries around the world, has invaded no less than two countries in the last decade and is responsible for bullyish diplomatic (and sometimes underhanded) tactics for over a century.

And yet we celebrate when a business starts accepting dollars, a currency that comes into existence supporting a questionable military. We create companies whose mission is helping them trade this dirty money for clean. We ask reputable sites to legitimize it by treating it as just one more money transfer service, like accepting a new credit card type.

It's time for those of us who believe in peace to put a stop to this. I don't suggest making dollars illegal - enforcing such a ban would require truly scary violations of liberty. But what we can do is establish a social norm of treating dollars like the warmongering tokens they are. Don't accept them in payment, and look twice at a seller who accepts them - if you can find a similar business that takes, say bitcoins, buy from them instead.

It won't stop dollars completely - an financial instrument that owes a full 50% of its existence to the US military industrial complex. But if decent people don't accept dollars, it means these thugs and worse will have to finance their morally questionable acts by asking us directly, which allows us to at least have some moral oversight, cutting in to their warmaking ability. And that, by the simple rules of democratic principles that supposedly the US believes in, means that people will feel the cost of war by direct taxation, and fewer politicians will choose to wage wars.

However, even if that is fixed (e.g. some other similar cryptocurrency without that issue) I would add two more issues: 1) The system as a whole, for any possible system similar to bitcoin, seems vulnerable to being disrupted by anyone with enough money (at best this would still cost a fair amount of money, but I'm fairly sure it would cost a lot less and be less recoverable than trying to similarly disrupt (at least most) other currencies). 2) The estimates I've seen suggest that a huge amount of power is going into cryptocurrencies for no good reason. This seems like both a horrible response to global warming and (per point 1) is making the same cryptographic mistake that hashcash made on a much smaller scale. Hashcash seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'm not sure why it seems like a good idea to anyone now.

I would love to see more work done on various ways to implement robust local currencies rather than all this effort on trying to create fragile global currencies that suck huge amounts of power. Last I looked there were a few things available but it seems like a lot more can be done.

I'm not sure if there's a specific term for the technique of rewriting a passage of prose to argue for the negation of said passage- I guess it's a distilled reductio ad absurdum, one that's been fractionated away to retain the spirit of the already rather palatable, crowd-pleasing reductio form, discarding the rigour in the name of intensifying the flavours and improving the mouthfeel.

The lack of rigour doesn't mean this class of analyses are wrong- it's just easier for logical errors to remain undetected, fermenting behind the devastating impression that the author's arguments can be used to prove anything, and thus prove nothing. It's hard to track these errors, flowing as they do through the unvalved, convoluted network of criss-crossing ambiguities and imprecision that is natural language and the degrees of freedom it affords when parsing a text.

The distilled reductio relies on a gestalt dissonance between superficial similarities in tone and structure, and the inverted conclusion of the two passages, while never attempting to refute the arguments themselves. Of course, for the purposes of logical analysis, tone merely helps arguments go down better, and is irrelevant to the arguments themselves. The only thing that's really retained, then, is the structure of the arguments, and once you are allowed to swap out premises at will, the infinite malleability of natural language will allow you to transform any argument to fit the structure, like liquid conforms to the shape of a glass.

We could instead engage directly with the arguments, claiming, for example, that Bitcoin is very much in the nascent stages, and aims to solve fundamental problems in the financial industry. Of course the current financial industry is better at a lot of things, we'd say. It's aged, matured, had an enormous superstructure of fixes and optimizations and safeguards built over decades and decades. It's equivalent to arguing grain alcohol is a better tech than battery-powered cars will ever be, while ignoring the enormous entrenched infrastructural advantages afforded to ethanol. And then we'd argue that comparing Bitcoin and the entire financial industry misses the point- you should be discussing decentralised vs centralised currencies.

That's probably a more meaningful (albeit less entertaining) way of arguing against the OP. Of course, if you disagree with me, you could rewrite this comment, changing the content completely while carefully retaining all the supererogatory references to alcohol and drinking, and it would seem superficially comparable, especially if the post began with an anchoring catchphrase like "Why Do Decent People Accept Dollars", or "I Need A Drink."

I'm keeping an eye on bitcoin as it might finally let me spend money online without first having to ask permission to do so.