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Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto?

Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"

It's also the #1 use case for USD $100 bills.

Briefcases of $100 bills have long been used for illicit payments, as depicted in numerous books and movies.

Most $100 bills, in fact, are not even in the US![a]

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[a] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/12/177051690/most...

I thought the #1 use case for crypto was ransomware, followed by shitcoin rug-pulls, and the ability to commit theft without recourse.

Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.

That's a rather narrow view of crypto's uses. What about subverting democracy by bribing the President?

For me it was buying a computer from newegg but I confess I'm not playing in the same league.

What was the benefit to you over using USD? (actually wondering)

1. Get rid of the few mBTC I had left after I realized how bad I'm at crypto trading

2. Fully live the concept of buying something physical from a virtual money I got by mining some now defunct coins.

Isn't it just a subset of #3?

Back in 2011 I remember a lot of people talking about how the Chinese oligarchs were using it to evade currency controls and funnel their wealth out of China.

What a deeply troubling and cynical comment.

As far as I know, nowhere in the Bitcoin white paper or the original code base. Does it say anything about what you seem to think it's use cases are.

Bitcoin has one main use, digital cash, that can be sent instantly and for free or a very low fee.

Edit: I would agree though, that anything other than that is probably a scam.

the problem is as a means of cash it’s inferior to existing systems in pretty much every dimension. more expensive, slower, more risk, higher volatility. the cash story for crypto is not good.

It seems entirely accurate to me, at least in a POSIWID sense.

The original theory of Bitcoin was, as described in the paper, decentralized digital cash. But in practice it was never optimized for what normal people use cash for. As system like that would be something like M-PESA.

Even at the time, cash was declining in usage. In the 18 years since, it has declined a lot more. And for good reason, because what most people want for most things isn't digital cash, but digital money. E.g., debit cards and Venmo.

So pretty naturally Bitcoin has value only for a few niche use cases that are not well served by more effective systems. Various sorts of crime, mostly. Digital cash, sure, but the kind that's transferred in unmarked envelopes slid quietly across the table. The kind that is delivered in a briefcase.

As a side note, it also failed in its goal of being decentralized. The mining power is very concentrated. Much more so than the banking industry, for example. And most users keep their Bitcoin on deposit in centralized services. So it's again basically banking but worse.

Men of principles often mistake the experience and observations of others for cynicism when it does not align with said principles.

This applies to a great deal, not just bitcoin.

Relevant citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

"We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." - Maurice Allais

What? "Instantly and for a very low fee"?

Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees.

And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending.

So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on.

Bitcoin via the Lightning Network is near cost-free and instant. And it's not a hack, it's just a network of payment channels.

>And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle >Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction

So it's cheaper to use Paypal ?

They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again.

So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.

High tx fees are an essential goal in Bitcoin's design: in the long term, when the block subsidy becomes insignificant, Bitcoin's security will rely almost entirely on tx fees.

Pointing at the BTC transaction fee and saying it is super expensive is like pointing at a problematic car model and saying all cars are bad.

There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds.

You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coins, that happens to include BTC, but also many other much faster and cheaper options, that are used to globally remit payments every day.

What it's replacing, by the way, Western Union, Wise and the like, is also pretty unblockable and unrefundable.

What? I was replying to someone who explicitly referenced the Bitcoin whitepaper, they were clearly talking about BTC. And the protocol from the whitepaper was actually pretty bad, from a cost and transaction time point of view. It's gotten a bit better with some hacks layered on top of it.

And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up so much electricity on mining. The main difference is that they don't operate in some areas where BTC still can (like evading sanctions, like this), and the speculative nature of BTC (which is actually a net negative on using it as a cash).

It's clearly not untrackable. It's never been untrackable. That's how they know it went to Iran.

Only because in this case they used a centralized exchange. The amount of actual circulation to countries like Iran and North Korea is likely many orders of magnitude higher that what is knowable.

Bitcoin is traceable by design. That's how a public ledger works. It is merely pseudonymous. But it leaves complete public money trail. If your Bitcoin ever associate with your real identity, which they tend to do when you actually use them, your anonymity is gone.

There is a reason why Monero exists.

I know some pretty sharp folks who fork for various police departments chasing illicit crypto related activity. The amount of stuff they can track including timing of transactions, entry and exit points, etc, and so over a long period of time means that most of the traditional anyonmization methods like tumblers simply do not work. Eventually someone, somewhere makes a mistake and the transactions and wallets can be traced.

If you have dirty money to hide, it's much better to hide it in a bank in Panama, or fill a sports bag with gold bars and fly it out on your private jet than use crypto.

Anything you can do from your bedroom, police can track from theirs.

I am working to track and trace and time transactions and while this is possible when and if you know the identity of at least one participant it’s quite another thing when no identity is known at all. Criminals know that so it’s notoriously hard to pull off. Thanks to Daleware secrecy and lax Super PAC rules to disclose sources of funds it’s not going to get easier.

So either your friends are genius saucers or they have effective government intelligence that would be highly appreciated. I’d be interested.

You are spot on regarding the bedroom though. Exporting physical USD is far more lucrative, by the shipload, often by Chinese Money Laundering Organisations, for free.

There is a third option, that those being tracked make mistakes

By definition the police only ever detect and catch those they are capable of detecting and catching. It's entirely in their interest to let people believe their capabilities are much greater than they really are. That goes double for the companies that sell this technology to the police.

Including sending and receiving Monero? (This is a serious question; I don't have a perspective on this yet.)

Every single transaction is public information. If you carry a wallet into Iran, and it's coins are used through 20 different transactions to purchase weapons, all of those can be traced back to their origin.

Well, that depends on which cryptocurrency is used, doesn't it?

That's like saying every currency note is traceable because it has a serial number. If someone hands you a dollar today can you trace it starting from where it was printed to everything it was used for until it eventually got into your hands?

Yeah you can look up bitcoin wallet IDs on the ledger, but you can also generate an unlimited number of wallets, and pass coins in any combination through any number of mixers and tumblers, and exchange it between multiple currencies (some of them truly untrackable). If people or organizations want to stay anonymous in the crypto ecosystem they can very easily do so.

The difference is that with cash we don't write the serial number of every bill for every transaction in an easily-accessible central ledger. There's no such thing as an off-the-books Bitcoin transaction, by nature.

Except none of that happened. It didn't stay anonymous, it just went to Iran.

Did not happen != cannot happen

A lot of things can happen, but what did happen is the coins went to Iran.

Not if they used Monero

I don’t understand the point of this. It is no different than traditional finance.

People do and did transfer drug money before and they will keep transferring drug money. I don’t see what blockchain has to do with that.

On the other hand, I use blockchain personally for completely legal purposes and find it very useful.

Easy to do international transfers, easy to buy different currencies even if local government is trying to make it hard. Also I have more trust in it compared to countries that I live in or travel to.

Another big aspect of it is no hidden costs and borderline scamming behavior I get from credit card companies or banks when doing international spending or transfers. This is not even about the insane prices, the feeling of getting scammed is even worse.

Also it is literally governments reason of existence to preserve order and catch criminals. Banning everything used by criminals is insanely stupid.

Same idea with cryptography, same with internet, same with cash.

It’s 100% trackable. It’s anonymous but there are many datapoints that could be used to deanonymize if the transaction parties are not extremely careful

Could someone explain to me where the myth of "crypto = untrackable" comes from, and why it's still being perpetuated?

Storing a record of every single transaction on a publicly accessible blockchain sounds trackable by design

In the case of bitcoin, surely.

Some other coins not so much trackable, and that's the reason some countries don't like them: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-delist-monero-zcash-4...

Fascinating, I didn't know that Zcash / Monero worked that way. Thanks!

The truth is there are some currencies that are by design untrackable—monero and zcash, for example, which use privacy preserving techniques to avoid tracking. (IMO zcash is a better implementation than monero, but shrug.)

Bitcoin and ethereum and most other crypto currencies are absolutely traceable in the sense that anyone can see who you send your money to. And all of the implementations have the core challenge of getting back to fiat—at some point, you withdraw cash or otherwise pay a real person to do something for you. There’s no way around that.

I think it’s part of the Origin Story.

Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto almost 20 years ago. There are a number of wallets that people believe belong to Satoshi (have they proven they belong to SN?)

Yet the identification of Satoshi has eluded a global hunt to identify him. Maybe law enforcement has not been involved, but the mystery definitely suggests that BitCoin can help mask identity.

The wallets attributed to Satoshi have not seen any coin movement so it only shows that one can publish code pseudonymously, not that one can use BTC anonymously.

It's the overconfidence of 90s kids who knew how to program the VCR and use the modem.

Money laundering is only good when our people are doing it.

> Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto?

What is even the point of crypto if you can't commit crimes with it?

What's funny is that Bitcoin is now the most tracked ledger on the planet. If I wanted to do some sort of obscure value exchange it would be my last choice.

Can't anyone basically sanction entire wallets, and mark them, and make some legislation that any transaction involving coins originating from those wallets be rejected by all payment processors and exchanges in regulated markets?

I mean, they obviously can, but probably they have elected not to do so. But if crypto becomes a tool in the hands of enemy nation states, such regulation can't be soo far off.

Though that would create a secondary market for these 'tainted' coins, and would probably have far-reaching consequences into the crypto ecosystem.

OFAC already sanctions crypto wallets. https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/594

You can't track individual coins, so you'd have to "taint" entire wallets. Using a mixer would taint the mixer and every wallet it sent to. I'd think this would end up tainting almost everything before too long.

Bitcoin also doesn't require the receiver to authorize a transaction, so if you had control of a tainted wallet, you could taint other wallets at will, wielding it like a weapon.

Doesn't seem feasible. Not that this always stops legislators.

> Using a mixer would taint the mixer and every wallet it sent to. I'd think this would end up tainting almost everything before too long.

Is that actually an issue? I am looking for it but I can't see a downside.

It was at least in theory an issue when they tried to sanction mixers. In fact people would purposely send tainted crypto to well known wallet addresses of celebrities etc. making them technically run afoul of OFAC

Depends on your goal. If you want to keep the system going while blocking "dirty" money, it's not going to work. If you want to use that as a stealth method of banning the whole system, then full steam ahead.

Would banning the whole system have any downside? It's still unclear to me what crypto is supposed to be useful for.

It seems to me that the people who want the unblockable currency out of government control are not the same people who want to block money transfers to countries like Iran.

you mean its not used for the Paul brothers latest meme coin rug pulls?

I'd argue the #1 use case is ransomware and scamming, but this has to be a close second. Honestly the journey from "The blockchain is the future, everyone must see that" to where we are now really feels like the one we're taking with 'AI'.

In the end it will still exist, but the use case is going to be so much less inspiring than people want to believe, outside of medical and fundamental research at least.

Not just the #1 use case, the only use case. Real money is better in every scenario other than crime.

The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash. The unavoidable cost of freedom has always been that some people will misuse it. Personally, I would rather have freedom even if it gets misused than not have freedom even if it means crime is over.

> The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash.

Not quite like cash: collecting and transferring US$1.7B in cash—actual physical paper—is probably more logistically challenging than BTC.

I understand the argument for freedom, but depending on the scale/dosage many things that could be fine in small quantities aren't as good in large ones.

Contrary to a lot of comments here, the only way to use bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) without tracking is to mine it yourself, and even then...

Where did you get it? Purchased/transferred? Where did they get it? What else did the person with that wallet do?

If the answer is "mined", even then, you have to actually do something with it, right? Buy something? Where is that something shipped? At worst you'll have to pay customs on it, and have it actually get through customs. At best, your address is in a database now.

Have it shipped somewhere obscure? Video cameras are everywhere. Have it shipped to someone else's house and steal it off their porch? Again, cameras everywhere.

Not have a physical item? Just a service? That's pretty much the closest you'll get to anonymous money transfer and full usage (along with whatever VPN you prefer).

Cool that was a fun mental exercise. Now everyone tell me why I'm wrong!

I mean, I can meet you in an ally, transfer some satoshis from my wallet to yours, you hand me a wad of cash/jewels/MtG/collector funkos and you might not even know my name.

If one of two options can't be regulated or tracked, that is the option that will predominantly be used by actors who have outsized interest in being regulation or being tracked.

Is Iran supposed supposed to be banned on Binance?

It's a US-sanctioned country so allied nations play along with the sanctions and Binance is located within that US sphere of influence so Iran is supposed to be currently banned, yes.

The article title doesn't say "Fired". The HN title is kind of misleading.

It not the original title but I'm not sure it's "misleading"

> Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.

I think NYT uses multiple titles for some articles. I had copy pasted it

They A/B test titles. You can see it in the URL, where the recessive title often lives on. They may also use different titles for print/digital.

You can see https://bsky.app/profile/nytdiff.bsky.social for some examples of how the NYT frequently revises titles and abstracts after publication. Most of them seem harmless at least.

>Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.

https://archive.today/t2pG6

Stop using archive.today, they've been found to inject malicious code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006

Do you mean this? https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... the malicious code wasn't injected, it was served with their captcha.

They shouldn't have used users to ddos someone's blog, but this seems like a one off attack against a perceived threat to the service's privacy. I don't condone that ddos attack, but it's been a very useful service over the years.

Here's a more functional alternative: https://pressreleased.alwaysdata.net/

Please understand that circumventing copyright makes it more difficult for journalists to make a living.

Copyright isn't being circumvented - the content of the website is made available for the public and the website just grabs what is publicly available.

Is there a micropayment option or something? I wish I could friction-free, buy access to these sites al al carte without dealing with them directly or setting up a recurring subscription directly with them.

Best we can do is a monthly subscription, with every dark pattern known to man to prevent cancellation.

They should learn to code.

I'm a subscriber, but not everyone is.

Subscribers can share the link as a gift, so readers can see the original, not the proxied version.

I cannot trust that a gift link does not tie to my IRL identity I subscribe under. I can trust that archive links do not. The NY Times gets my money either way. It's an opsec concern. Trust no one.

If someone wants to post gift links in every thread, just let me know who to pay to enable that, I am happy to.

And by making it easy for them to circumvent copyright, they have even less incentive to support the journalists who did the reporting.

I don't know why this is downvoted, it's the truth. NYT actually has a "gift article" functionality that makes it easy to share articles with non-subscribers.

You are 100% correct. I find the attitude that everything should be free a bit tedious. But then again, why does the truth have to be paywalled while lies are free. I believe it is a detriment to society that we cannot publicly find reporting. Yes I know now come the cynics who will argue bias. But that’s just a failure of reading comprehension, not fair reporting doctrine.

So yes. I’m with you 100%.

Remember that the CEO of Binance was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to financial fraud.

I wonder if the pardon bribe is less if your crime is something near and dear to the Orange King's heart.

It's more than just that.

> President Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had spent four months in federal prison in 2024 for his role in the firm’s crimes. The Trump family’s crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, has forged close business ties with Binance, and Mr. Zhao was a guest this month at a conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Binance should be considered a US instrument now.

Iran obviously missed the memo. All they have to do is setup a wealth fund and invest heavily in a Trump venture; then they can become a most favored nation and forego all this conflict.

Sure but wasn't his prosecution generally regarded as political? The Biden admin went hard against crypto towards the end largely to appease donors, at the disservice to consumers. Gary Gensler changed a lot of rules without notice, and targeted people who had previously looked towards the SEC for guidance and followed the rules. Certainly I remember (at least at the time) the arrest of CZ was regarded as political, which is presumably why he was later pardoned and not commuted

Perhaps CZ's prosecution was generally regarded as political among the people you talk to regularly, but the contemporaneous media consensus (at least to my recollection) was that Binance had openly flouted US law for years and was finally being reined in. E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/business/binance-crypto-c... was representative.

Regarded, by whom? Not by financial experts such as Matt Levine. It looks like the prosecution followed the books and the law and the long-held SEC position. If you’re honestly interested, Levines newsletters at the time carry a lot of detail, the given reasoning beyond politics, and historical comparison to non-crypto decisions.

It’s too easy of a spin to later declare events as all political; one should be careful to make that claim unless accompanied with good arguments.

Regarding plea deal/guilt: there is sufficient material publicly available to come to the conclusion that yes Binance willingly and knowingly invested effort into circumventing the law and SECs policies. Regardless of whether that law was set up for “political purposes“ or not, it was not some honest mistake or differences of interpretation. Don’t fall into the trap of rewriting history.

Citation needed.

Bear in mind that this guy pleaded guilty in a court case. Even if the prosecution is political, the facts don't lie.

Bear in mind that this guy pleaded guilty in a court case.

In my mind that doesn't mean shit. Prosecution said, "if this goes to trial, we'll try to get life in prison. Or you could take our plea deal." That is why 90-some percent of prosecutions (EDIT: in the U. S.) go plea deal instead of trial.

I would imagine very rich people have extremely good lawyers though that can tell them very accurately if they will get off if it goes to trial.

When it comes to extremely rich people, "political prosecution" generally means that the behavior was absolutely criminal, but that it's usually something they let rich people get away with.

It can also mean it's political. Famously (whether you think he's guilty or not) John Kiriakou pled guilty because he knew John Brennan was going to throw the entire might of the justice system at him. When he talks about the experience, his decisions are made with consideration to the fact the president's inner circle wanted him in jail and he wasn't fighting a fair battle.