How do you collect taxes when a completely anonymous, untraceable currency can be transported all over the world, nearly instant and free, and can't be shut down?

this has consumed you, Burt

the notion of tulip bulbs as a 'gold disruptor' is kind of interesting

Hey burt, buy me some dark web drugs.

so with these bitcoin ATMs - do you have to even put in your address or anything?

i have never seen / used one

but it dawned on me that in terms of money laundering - if you were a drug dealer with tons of cash - you could take it to a bitcoin ATM and directly convert it to bitcoin

no AML / KYC process

no oversight

that's very scary

normally a drug dealer gets caught at the bank when they start making regular odd, just- sub-$10,000 deposits

bitcoin could be making millionaires our of opioid-selling thousandaires

I don't view this as a negative.

I'm an economist and I've been been following Bitcoin for quite some time now. What I've always found the most entertaining property of cryptocurrency is how it exposes the massive economic illiteracy among the so-called financial journalists and, indeed, a large portion of the financial elite and even quite a few prominent economists (Joseph Stiglitz, to name one).
Having said that, I want to arm my fellow Bitcoin users with a small amount of knowledge that should be enough to knock out the most widely held objection to cryptocurrency's value that you would encounter from your families, friends and acquaintances: the idea that money needs to be 'backed' by something, whether it's a financial institution, an army or just plain belief in it. The simple fact is that this isn't true now, has never been true, and will never be true.
Money is valuable because it is the simplest, most efficient and most effective way of signalling economic data across large groups of people. A currency, the manifestation of money, is valuable when it does a good job of transferring the aforementioned data by being:
1) easy to use and understand by everyone
2) tamperproof such that it resists corruption of the original signal
3) neglegible in overhead costs
Cryptocurrency is a happy marriage of information technology improving n°1 and distributed cryptology improving n°2, while SegWit and Lightning continue to improve on n°3. Put simply, in terms most educated people can understand: Bitcoin has value because it is better at acting as an information carrier for economic data than any traditional currency. It protects signal integrity to a degree that no other currency type can. This is why cryptocurrency is so valuable, and why it will continue to soar until all fiat currency has collapsed around it.
Good money, in short, is all about reliably transferring economic preferences. It has sod all to with 'backing', 'trust', government 'protection', 'sound' fiscal policy or any of the other racketeering schemes that powerful groups have been using to take the data signalled by ordinary people and corrupt it into something that benefits only the elites.
Any time a journalist or so-called expert objects to cryptocurrency because it's not 'backed' by any of the above, they betray their ignorance, their illiteracy and their complete blindness to the revolution that's happening right under their feet and which will, in time, bring down the corrupt power structures of our world to create a freer, fairer society for all of us.