FUD

Bitcoin is a tool for criminals

Bitcoin gives criminals the ability to transact with each other.

It enables money laundering and other “funny business”.

Government control of money is the best way to stop financial crime.

Facts

In 2020, the criminal share of all cryptocurrency activity fell to just 0.34% ($10.0 billion in transaction volume).

Bitcoin has an unprecedented amount of transparency on its transactions. Making it extremely difficult to hide evidence and not preferable for criminal activity.

According to the UN, it is estimated that between 2% and 5% of global GDP ($1.6 to $4 trillion) annually is connected with money laundering and illicit activity. All of that is in government fiat money.

Criminals and Tech

This is not meant to condone criminal activity, it is only an observation on how it operates.

Criminals face the most amount of friction in economic markets. Due to the legality of their activities, they have the hardest time operating effectively. To counter this, criminals have to be on the forefront of technology in order to gain an advantage against their opposition.

Some examples include, 

Dear Mr Ford,

I want to thank you for building the Ford V8 as fast and as sturdy a car as you did,

otherwise I would not have gotten away from the coppers in that Wisconsin, Minnesota case.

Yours till I have the pleasure of seeing you.

John Dillinger

These technologies gave criminals an upper hand on their illicit activities. Does that mean governments should have banned pagers and cell phones to stop drug dealing? Should Henry Ford have stopped automobile production so horses could catch getaway drivers? Should we ban the internet because terrorists use it to communicate? The truth is, crime will continue to be present in our society, regardless of the best efforts of the criminal justice system. Communications tools like cell phones, the internet, and bitcoin should not be suppressed because they benefit society so much more than they enable crime.

Fight for Freedom

There are non profit organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have already gone through this battle with the internet. 

“Even in the fledgling days of the Internet, EFF understood that protecting access to developing technology was central to advancing freedom for all. In the years that followed, EFF used our fiercely independent voice to clear the way for open source software, encryption, security research, file sharing tools, and a world of emerging technologies.”

Bitcoin is simply the progression of a monetary technology. It is a tool that can bring financial independence and freedom to everyone who wants to use it. It can’t discriminate as bitcoin doesn’t know a name, race, sex, nationality, or personal history. Anyone from a village in El Salvador to Nigerian Protesters blocked from their bank transactions can use bitcoin. From a US Senator, to the Pirate Bay co-founder. 

Bitcoin is a money for all. If you can stop a criminal from using bitcoin, then an authoritarian government can stop a citizen from fleeing the country with their life savings. There is no middle ground.

Censorship Resistance

Bitcoin is designed to be a decentralized, censorship resistant protocol. The goal was to create a system for final settlement of a digital assets without trusting a 3rd party. Since its inception over 12 years ago, Bitcoin has become the most decentralized network in the world. The Bitcoin network has been functional for 99.98% of the time since its inception on Jan 3 2009 02:54:25 GMT.

The Criminal US Dollar

The United States Dollar is the most used currency for black market transactions in the world.  It’s estimated that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved and deposited into bank accounts annually. With half of that money coming to the United States.

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