[midmagico]

The first payments in bitcoin were not the pizzas. Malmi sold bitcoins for money prior to that.

The first people using Bitcoin were not ransomware users; the first bootstrappers were not involved with Silk Road at all.

It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.

Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.

Satoshi predicted significantly specialized mining operations, which is exactly what happened. He didn't predict pooling, which happened to be a massive accelerator. Pool mining is also not criminal in nature, intent, nor progress.

There is no coercive force in Bitcoin. The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive. If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero; thus, your assertion that ransomware is some kind of driving force which imparts value to Bitcoin is self-inconsistent on its face.

[kmeisthax]

>Mining on broken-into-computers is not possible.

Why not? If I have enough access to machine in order to get an (asymmetric) encryption key off of a server, encrypt all your files with it, and delete the originals, why can't I also warm the CPU for the few days it takes for my victim to buy Bitcoin? It doesn't matter if the returns are awful because the hardware I'm mining on was stolen (thus free).

>It is quite the insult to those people, many of whom were highly ethical, to insist that their efforts, development, and research were motivated by illegal intent.

Malmi, the "Bitcoin pizza guy", Satoshi, and everyone else in the legit side of Bitcoin are not the targets of my original post and I don't believe they had any illegal motivations. They just had the wrong priors, and accidentally built something that's enormously useful for criminals looking to build a parallel state.

> The use of Bitcoin by people is entirely non-coercive.

The use of the word "entirely" is dangerous to you. Because the mere existence of a ransomware program demanding Bitcoin - and there are a lot of them - lets me be cheeky and refute your argument.

If you want to argue that there are substantial non-coercive uses of Bitcoin, sure. I don't believe they're big enough to sustain Bitcoin's current or prior valuations.

> If ransomware were its only use, and were not merely a parasitic opportunistic drain on Bitcoin momentum, then its overall value would be zero;

Having to buy Bitcoin to pay ransom puts upward pressure on Bitcoin prices. It's not a drain on adoption, it's a booster of it, because a LOT of organizations get hacked and have to use Bitcoin to pay ransoms.