>The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account"

I see this as a very naive statement. A big story in Russia - popular singer sold her appartment, then told court she was scammed to sell appartment and have sent all money to scammers. Appartment returned to the singer, court suggested the buyer to get money from unidentified scammers.

So much for court orders :))) Poor buyer has lost > $1M. There are over 3000 similar cases all across Russia. Appartment sellers get their apartments back in court without compensating buyers. This madness is going to be resolved someday, next will appear immediately.

Another story - a prosecutor's office tells that largest pasta producer in Russia was actually illegally bought from the government some 20 years ago. Boom, entire business goes to government (to prosecutor friends, really). I can go on and on, there are literally hundreds such stories just in Russia just in the past couple of years.

The point is - having certain independence from the government is good. For the majority of world population (China, Middle Wast, all Africa) government is not a friend but either an unpredictable force of nature or a foe.

Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back.

A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back.

Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?

> Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter.

That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.

Okay, tell me how I buy something over the internet without tying the purchase to my government ID.

Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.

>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling

That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In several countries, people use crypto to buy food, medicine, or basic goods because their local currency is collapsing or their banking system is dysfunctional, or their entire nation has been cut off from the global financial system as a decision of few politics persons.

Its fine to criticise the scams and speculation — there is plenty of that — but pretending thats the only use case ignores the people who depend on it for everyday survival.

But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?

Depends on the blockchain. There are plenty of ways to have private transactions.

Bitcoin came about to solve the trustless component and provides weak anonymity.

Then Monero, ZCash, etc built on that to add privacy and anonymity.

If you use bitcoin nowadays and expect anonymity or privacy you are clearly mistaken but there are plenty of platforms built for privacy and anonymity on extensions of that same underlying technology.

Like basically every vendor that accepts cryptocurrency and values privacy/anonymity is going to offer monero as an option.

> But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying.

Except that they serve you before collecting payment regardless of which payment method you use.

And even if they didn't, having the customer pay at the same time they receive the food isn't a trust problem for the restaurant or the customer, because the customer gets the food before the restaurant gets the money but the restaurant gets the money before the customer eats the food. And if someone comes into your kitchen to steal food without paying, that isn't really a payment system issue to begin with.

The investment in terms of speculation is primarily of interest to the speculators.

Some of them are, when the country you're in is oppressive. But having something that can do that is good.

And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels.

It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.

> So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person.

"Thing that solves some problems for some people doesn't solve all problems for all people" is not a very useful criticism.

> Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much.

The problem with this argument is that cryptocurrency now exists whether it's legal or not and using it for illegal things is already illegal. Drug dealers are committing a felony by selling drugs and if that hasn't deterred them then neither will making something else they're doing a crime too.

So all of the negative uses are going to happen regardless of whether you also ban the positive uses. At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?

> Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted.

People keep making this claim and it keeps not making sense.

You don't need someone's permission to send them Bitcoin. Meanwhile large exchanges keep billions of dollars in a single wallet and have single wallets that do billions of dollars in transactions over a short period of time.

So let's consider the two possible ways this can work: First, if you get coins directly from a tainted wallet then you get in trouble, but if it was several steps back then it doesn't matter. This is, of course, useless, because then people would just transfer the coins through a couple of other wallets first.

Second, any wallets that receive any tainted coins become tainted forever. Then immediately the vast majority of the chain is tainted because the coins have made the rounds through a large exchange at some point. Worse, it's pointless to try to defend against it by refusing tainted funds, because you can't actually refuse funds. Your billion dollar wallet or freshly mined Bitcoin can be tainted by any troll who sends you a dollar from a tainted wallet without your permission, and trying to treat coins as non-fungible is probably a good way to get someone to troll you like that.

Which gives you two alternatives again. The first is that all coins can be tainted by trolls, which will in practice cause exactly that to happen and thereby make the premise meaningless. The second is that you can try to say that it doesn't count if someone sent them without your permission, but now you can't tell if something is tainted by looking at the chain because it can't tell you which transactions were unauthorized by the recipient, and moreover you would then have a mechanism for getting dirty coins into a clean wallet.

In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".