Bill Gates says cryptocurrencies are killing people

[Vizardlorde]

we need to go back to a time where gaming rigs are within reach

[derpkitteh]

Amazon doesn't accept Bitcoin and my local drug dealer does? Holy shit batman.

i hope they never will accept it. the government needs to destroy this trash.

anything that can make the government regulate this into nothingness is welcomed by me.

[Najnaj]

It's not like it matters. Even when the US catches banks laundering actual USD for terrorists and drug cartels we fine them for less than they made in profits doing so lol.

In a world free of corruption though, he's right. We just don't live in that world so it's a fairly moot point.

1. In a world free of corruption this debate would be irrelevant.

2. If we would only do things that turned out perfect we would not do anything at all.

[hulkgor]

Considering bitcoin farming already spends more energy then most small countries in the world, it's getting to absurd levels.

[m4xc4v413r4]

It's so cute when people are called out on their bullshit comments, and then try to add conditions to it after the fact. <tousles your hair>

How the hell did you prove him wrong? By saying "No, it really isn't."? Amazing proof you're providing. Guess you should just eat your own words...

[Graeham]

It seems like fear mongering. I'll take his words with a pinch of salt - cryptocurrencies may not be perfect, but they've made regular people wealthy who would not otherwise have been able to ever pull themselves out of their poor circumstances using the current systems in place.

[Themius]

It's so cute when people are called out on their bullshit comments, and then try to add conditions to it after the fact. <tousles your hair>

https://news.bitcoin.com/rogue-silk-...-u-s-marshals/

You literally just reiterated the same thing you said without actually providing anything so your argument is just full of bullshit I suspect.

[Macaquerie]

It seems like fear mongering. I'll take his words with a pinch of salt - cryptocurrencies may not be perfect, but they've made regular people wealthy who would not otherwise have been able to ever pull themselves out of their poor circumstances using the current systems in place.

Those people didn't get wealthy by doing a productive activity or adding anything of real value to the world though, they just got rich at the expense of others and most will see their fortunes evaporate when the inevitable crash comes.

[Gohzerlock]

People are talking about cash in this thread like it doesn't have serial numbers.

[roxfm]

People are talking about cash in this thread like it doesn't have serial numbers.

How does that help with tracing? Once a cash withdrawal has been made from a bank, it is virtually untraceable until it reenters the banking system.

Here's how it goes:
Fed prints money. (Say $100)
Money sent to banks
Bank X gives out loan or investment or [transaction] to Entity A.
Entity A withdraws half in cash ($50). Half remains in the bank. Now their books of accounts will show cash in hand balance of $50, which may or may not be true. No one checks that.

At that point it can be used for N number of transactions in cash for absolutely any product and/or service.

Until the $50 is back into the system. No matter how much the banks would like to pretend they crack down on AML transactions or terrorism funding - they are in it themselves.

Go look at the history of scams and proven (courts finding banks guilty) cases of bank fraud. Every single time, they have gotten away with only a slap on the wrist.

[Lazuli]

Cryptocurrency isn't killing people any more than cash but it sure is a cancer to the gaming community and a giant waste of energy.

I sincerely hope it dies in a fire.

[Auxora]

I think it's oversimplifying the opioid crisis bigtime to try to blame cryptocurrency. The cartels have been around far longer than bitcoin, moving billions in drugs and money around since way before cryptocurrency was around. It doesn't take bitcoin to move a load of meth or heroin north from Mexico or the Caribbean, or bucketloads of cash south. Likewise, terrorism has also been around far longer than bitcoin.

It seems to be a flaw in human nature to always try to condense a problem down to 1 simple cause and solution, when usually it's a lot more complicated than that. With or without bitcoin there are plenty of banks in neutral countries (Swiss, Luxembourg, Dubai, any one of about a dozen island countries) that do not report deposits. The opioid crisis is due to reckless doctors and drug companies overprescribing pain meds leading to addiction, along with the very broken health insurance system leading people in pain to look for opioids for cheaper relief. Cartels pushing high profit heroin is a big cause also. It's naive to think any of those large major social issues would be solved by eliminating digital currency. It would barely even be a tiny blip on the radar to those issues if it were completely banned.

I do think though that there will be some major thinning in cryptocurrency of the different coins. 99.9% of them will go belly up. But there is obviously a want of people desiring a currency free from the government, along with a need for fast and secure digital currency that cryptocurrency fills. But I'd bet in 5 or 10 years we end up with something closer to Visa or MasterCard with Bitcoin and maybe another coin type or two, where there is a least some more structure and regulation on them. As far as nothing backing them, the US hasn't been on the gold standard since 1933. So there's nothing more tangible backing the dollar bill than a bitcoin.

[Hiricine]

Cryptocurrencies don't kill people, drugs don't kill people, people kill themselves.

That being said, if the premise is that cryptocurrencies should be banned or there should be a moral imperative to stop using them on the grounds that it would protect some vulnerable people from abusing drugs, I don't see a compelling reason to be on board with that plan. Of course if the statement is simply "There are some people who would be alive today if not for Crypto," the answer is probably yes.

[Super Kami Dende]

Seems kind of silly, as all those products could be bought without Cryptocurrency as well and Terrorists weren't lacking for Funding before Cryptocurrency.

I get the point that it makes the anonymity easier, but anyone doing it on a large scale were smart enough to get around that sort of shit anyway.

Either way whilst I dislike Crypto shit, I don't think it does anymore damage to people in that regard. I mean Alcohol is bought with cash.

[Lochton]

Which can happen with a bank... and wasn’t there a very close call of a hack worth billions that didn’t happen simply because of a typo?

Apparently it is easier to hack cryptocurrencies than a bank, as well, unlike a bank theft, cryptocurrencies aren't under the same laws.

[Deleted]

Eh, I guess you can say the same about the Dollar then? Or any currency out there really.

[Deleted]

Funny considering MS is in a huge crypto partnership with IOTA. lol. Today BTC is mainly used as a store of value like say gold. These hitman buying, fentanyl injecting dark web geniuses are few and far between.. The $ is still king there by a factor 6756725675675675765457523567715781

If nothing else all the tears from gamers because their GFX costs 50$ more are hilarious and oh so yummy

[Deleted]

Good.

Bitcoin and the people mining it need to disappear so that we can once more see the price of graphics cards go down.

Mining BTC on GPUs is next to irrelevant since Asics came to the market. With the current difficulty, they never will give you any positive ROI.

ETH is the bad guy .

[Deleted]

Mr Gates : tax evasion

[XDurionX]

By that same logic the dollar is killing people as well.