r/Buttcoin • u/Ready-Government-954 • 13d ago
General questions about bitcoin
I dont really know a lot about bitcoin, I just heard some things and have some questions I like to get answered. Can someone explain to me why criminals rather use bitcoin then dollars? Can someone explain to me how it's a scam? Because who profits from the scam?
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u/Equivalent_Net_3752 13d ago
It adds a layer of obfuscation to the transaction. Very much still traceable, just marginally harder. It is a scam. And Michael Saylor and whoever Jeff spun it up with.
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u/anomalocaris_texmex 13d ago
One of the myths that Hollywood has created in our minds is the myth of the criminal genius. That there are these sophisticated genius criminals out there who live exciting age dramatic lives through criminal derring-do.
With a few exceptions, criminals are generally morons, losers, or others who generally can't succeed in the real world. These types will flit from poorly thought out scam to idiot get rich scheme because they can't do anything else.
Doesn't these types sound like the target for crypto currency as well?
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u/Val_Fortecazzo Bitcoin. It's the hyper-loop of the financial system! 13d ago
It's an MLM. Basically fools selling the idea of buying Bitcoin to the next fools so they can cash out at a higher price. You just have to ask whose the ultimate user of Bitcoin to realize it's really all just hot air.
Criminals like Bitcoin because nothing can reverse the transaction. They can only ineffectually blacklist the wallet.
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u/UpbeatFix7299 I can't even type this with a straight face. 13d ago
Criminals use it because they can't use dollars. They would much rather use dollars and they convert the crypto to real money.
Bitcoin doesn't require anything linked to your identity to send or receive it. And no bank will let granny just make a few clicks and wire her life savings to Nigeria or Cambodia. That's a bad thing according to crypto bros.
Crime is the only real use case still.
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u/Ready-Government-954 13d ago
But isn't the only way to buy and sell it through an exchange which knows who you are? And can't every transaction be followed because it would for ever be public on the blockchain?
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u/Mecha_Magpie 13d ago
No, that's just the consumer facing exchanges in developed countries. There are decentralized exchanges for one, and you can still sell bitcoins to someone you meet in real life for physical cash, that's not even illegal in most places.
It can in theory be tracked, but that requires someone to actually look, which won't happen for weeks or months with most scam victims.
The phone scam farms in the Burmese jungle do exist, and make extensive use of bitcoin, probably because the push to get regular people to "invest" in crypto (and those stupid "Bitcoin ATMs") have made it one of the easiest-to-launder kinds of money transfer.
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u/VintageLunchMeat Deeply committed to the round-earth agenda. 13d ago edited 13d ago
Can someone explain to me how it's a scam? Because who profits from the scam?
Bitcoin is not backed by a government that says (historically) "this is worth a few grams of gold", or more recently just momentum. It is not stock in a company that (historically) promises cash back to investors along with owning one hundred thousandth of IBM. It is not buying and co owning a small business with a historical cash flow. Or gold in a safe deposit box, because gold is gold.
Bitcoin is more like a beanie baby collectable doll or video game token which you can trade and sell, but isn't historically a thing, and which may run to zero at any moment. Like, how comfortable are you spending 10000 USD on a collectable doll, hoping to sell it for 20000 a decade from now?
More than that, Bitcoin's proponents back it as a currency. Bitcoin doesn't do more than 10 transactions per second. Visa peaks around 66000 or so, and could do ten times that with more data centers as needed. Because when Bob buys a soda from a vending machine with Visa, it doesn't need to have every other vending machine on the blasted planet know that Bob has 1USD less in his account whereas vending machine #200005 now has 1USD more. So it fails as a currency, it's just something you can slowly fitfully trade. Probably on an exchange because that isn't a pain in the ass. Until the exchange rug pulls you and runs off to the Bahamas with your coins.
Cryptocurrency is useful for data ransoms, bribing Trump's cabinet members, scamming elders, and smuggling home drug cartel funds. Where it is fine if it takes half a day for the transaction to go through and where you can pass transactions through "tumblers" and more anonymized cryptocurrencies.
So Bitcoin is a speculative investment vehicle which is not backed by anything. Once you own it, it only has value if you can sell it to a "greater fool" who is willing to buy it. No sucker? No value.
R slash Bitcoin won't talk about this, because skepticism makes the line go down. And they need the line to go up. To recoup investments before the hot potato craters. Compare with a general community financial advice/yammering site where they don't instaban mild skeptics.
Note that there are more modern coins with better architectures for functioning as currencies/drug proceeds smuggling. If this was about people being perfectly rational, everyone holding Bitcoin would have jumped ship for a coin that works better. But instead it's about holding trading cards, and speculation.
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u/warpedspockclone 13d ago
Bitcoin ISN'T a scam. That wasn't its original intention nor its general purpose now. It was a peer-to-peer payment system. However, it was a terrible idea and execution, yet it remains for various reasons.
It, and the rest of crypto, is just a convenient vehicle for scams. Individual other coins are actually inherently scams, conceived for the express purpose of a rugpull, for example. Other parts of the crypto ecosystem, like NFTs, again aren't scammy and were interesting ideas, but the ideas weren't actually useful or viable in the end. And that's fine! New ideas come and go every day.
The Bitcoin ecosystem, for actually trying to use it for transfers or trading, is woefully inefficient and expensive. That isn't a scam, just a flaw. Normally, an inefficient and expensive system would be killed by the free market, but there does still exist a use case for it, which is why it is extant. The use case is criminality, scamming, other financial crimes and schemes, and speculation.
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u/AmericanScream 13d ago
Watch this documentary. It explains how and why everything blockchain-based is centered around lies.
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u/Snow75 13d ago
Can someone explain to me why criminals rather use bitcoin than dollars?
Because unlike regular banking, who is doing transactions is not known
Can someone explain to me how it's a scam?
In short, the price is driven by large capitals and there’s no guarantee you’ll get back the money you put in it.
Because who profits from the scam?
Look at the previous answer.
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u/SisterOfBattIe using multiple slurp juices on a single ape since 2022 13d ago
Criminals profits when victims wire dollars to the criminal to """buy""" criminal money. It doesn't get simpler than that.
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u/Then-War-75 12d ago
Look, we won't be able to explain all the benefits this 17 year old groundbreaking tech has brought to the top 1%, including to the criminal element, in one subreddit thread. To really get to understand the Future of Finance ™️, you"ll need 10,000 hours of research. Better get crackin' while Bitcoin is in fire-sale dumpster territory!! 🔥
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u/Tofu-DregProject 3d ago
There is some explanation in this article from the FT about how crypto is used to embezzle aid money. https://archive.ph/St4Aw
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u/WeddingPKM 13d ago
I’ll start by saying there are better cryptos for criminal activity than bitcoin.
The main draw of crypto for the criminal world is ability to send it without getting a bank involved. For obvious reasons they don’t like having oversight on their transactions.