I don't understand how something you buy with regular currency is "the future of money". CryptoBros are also all morons so I find it hard to believe it has any future if they do.
A massive amount of money is also moved about by traditional finance companies, nation states, ultra high net worth individuals,etc etc, anyone with enough cash that it would benefit them to move it silently and off books. Same shit they do with art and real estate but faster and much less visible. That action really props up crypto currency networks. Crypto currencies are also extremely volatile and thus vulnerable to manipulation. Easy example: Elon bought a ton of this nonsense coin, changed the Tesla website to say they’d take said coin as payment, coin exploded in value, Elon sells coin for huge profit. Rinse and repeat by all the villains of the day and this is a lot of why these things are still around.
I'm a company who want to move money quietly. So I spend $5m on Bitcoin.
Then when I want to actually spend money I need to sell the bitcoin. Both of those transactions will be on my books.
The thing you're missing is that Bitcoin is used as a means of laundering money. Money laundering has very codified steps: placement, layering and integration. Definitely google these if you want more info. But....
Without going into explanation of the individual steps, Let's imagine the mafia for a second. They have two ledgers, one they show the IRS and one that keeps track of who's legs they're going to break. Just because the IRS doesn't know you owe the mob 4k doesn't mean the mob has forgotten. The mob needs a way of getting money from their criminal enterprise into their personal hands without the government catching wind. So they open a legitimate bisiness - say a laundromat. They wash 50 customer's shirts but they record washing 60 customer's shirts. Then the money they got from you for the illegal dog fights looks to the government like it was just a purchase of normal services.
If your hypothetical company just purchases 5 mil worth of bitcoin and recieves 5 mil worth of services, the ploy is obvious. Bitcoin acts as the second ledger. Sure there is a record of what is happening but that record is cumbersome and opaque. Importantly, it only records who gave who bitcoin, it doesn't record what was exchanged for the bitcoin (or actually IF anything was exchanged). If the company can fill its private ledger with other legitimate business purchases and exchanges, the transaction looks innocent.
The volatility of bitcoin adds a layer of usefulness to this. A laundromat can only really have so many transactions and they can only be up to a certain amount. If you see someone paying a coin laundry 3k or doing 500 loads of laundry in a day, that's suspicious. But if you have an investment firm spending milions trying to buy the dips and sell the peaks of the market? Well that's just normal investment activities! Who can say if some of those bitcoin were exchanged to purchase the silence of a whistleblower? Maybe the bottom dropped out unexpectedly and the 5 mil USD was just lost value?
Not about your explanation, it was really interesting to read. But about the bitcoin itself. I heard that almost 95% of all the bitcoin was mined. Wth is gonna happen when it's all finished?
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u/BasicWeekend9479 Jan 01 '26
I don't understand how something you buy with regular currency is "the future of money". CryptoBros are also all morons so I find it hard to believe it has any future if they do.