> It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold.
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?