Dear Alex Hawkins,

Thank you for posting your thoughts on this subject. For some reason, your views were obscured by my Medium page, I have taken the liberty to reproduce it below:

Bitcoin supports a massive amount of criminal activity. It’s just massive. For example, each of the top 10 sites on eroids.com does between $100k to $500k BTC profit per / day. Yes, that’s profit per day. These sites are largely drop shippers located in Turkey that have access to a corrupt Pharma supplier. There is a massive amount of corruption at the pharmaceutical warehouses in Turkey. So yeah, anyone from around the world can buy any pharmaceuticals they want at a deep discount from what they would have to pay for the very same drugs in the West ( exact same drugs since most US companies manufacture drugs in India, China and Turkey and then just mark it up to Americans ). And a lot of the drugs ( Pfizer hgh for example ) are very difficult to obtain in the West, even if you can afford the absurd out of pocket expense. Every professional athlete on Earth uses HGH and testosterone and where do you think they are getting it all from? You don’t even need to use the dark web, it’s all readily available on eroids.com. $100k to $500k profit per day, that’s just from selling steroids online. Now imagine what the profit is from selling hard drugs and schedule 1 & 2 pharmaceuticals. People with lots of Bitcoin then just launder their money through property using sites like Bitcoin Real Estate dot com. So yeah man, Bitcoin hasn’t been the greatest thing for society but it has certainly opened up a whole knew world for criminals. I think many people are completely oblivious to the utterly massive international criminal underworld that Bitcoin is facilitating.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and some insight on the criminal activity that Bitcoin facilitates.

To be sure, Bitcoin was always intended to be agnostic with regards to its use case — an experiment in “true” economic freedom and understandably, criminal elements were the first to exploit its ability to be used as a tool to facilitate crime.

And because it’s near impossible to obtain accurate, granular data on how Bitcoin is being used, despite best efforts using blockchain analytics, it is likely that Bitcoin contributes significantly in facilitating cross border criminal activity.

To that end, you are correct in suggesting that the general public is as yet unawares of just how much crime is being facilitated through Bitcoin — perhaps it will be difficult to ever know with any degree of precision.

But that in and of itself suggests that getting rid of Bitcoin will be far more challenging than authorities would have us believe.

So long as there continues to be a demand for illicit drugs, pornography, weapons and other illegal goods and services, there will be demand for means of untraceable value transfer, for which Bitcoin has been proved to be effective.

Thank you for your insight on this subject.

Yours,

Patrick