"What is Bitcoin good for? It isn’t money — that is, it isn’t a medium of exchange, something you can use to make payments. It isn’t a hedge against inflation. It isn’t a hedge against financial risks — on the contrary, the price of Bitcoin has generally moved in the same direction as the AI-related stocks driving the stock market these days, but with even greater volatility.
To the extent that Bitcoin has a use case, it is covering your financial tracks: crypto facilitates anonymous transactions that don’t leave a paper trail. Such transactions aren’t necessarily criminal, but many are."
The Trump Trade is Unraveling
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I've been listening to Lyn Alden. She knows a lotta stuff and is very interesting. Not making predictions, but explaining some plausible scenarios. She likes bitcoin on account of the governmental legal tender currency debasements that go on from time to time, due to overspending and crazy-huge national debts. She sees it as an alternative currency. Very portable, easy to move and transfer. It's a means to step out of that loop whereby you're always stuck holding cheaper and cheaper, shrinking dollars. Foreigners can use bitcoin/crypto to sell, and then amass dollars they would not otherwise be able to get. (There's the laundering prospect, eh?) Printing more dollars is a form of debasement; a default by a different means, is all...
But to me, crypto is just evil. Subversive. And subject to misuse for money laundering purposes, as already mentioned by PK.
Oh, and by the way: BOOM!
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/binance-trump-crypto-lawsuit-pardon.html
krug has a few things wrong, but substance right.
e.g., every blockchain transaction is visible and verifiable, that being the point.
what is tricky are the endpoint owners.
criminals needing actual fiat currency to live it up, the receivers at some point need that conversion from bitcoin. and it can be a weak point based on effort needed.
this is where law enforcement can connect every single prior bitcoin transaction ever made to that bitcoin acct, once any conversion involving a mainsteam financial institution reveals an owner.
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now keep in mind putin and xi effectively run the largest cybercrime armies on earth.
technically , they can be connected to cyberterrorism, and classified as 'legit' targets for the american military, as underway with maduro for narco-terrorism.
the difference being for trump, cybercrime is simply aspirational and he is very scared of putin and xi.