> getting at the hypocrisy of asking for a citation and then making an uncited claim

A person asking for a citation is not disallowed from making a claim. Someone else is free to ask for a citation from me, in return.

You are not only incorrect, which is fine, but you're unjustly calling me a hypocrite, which, personally, I consider to be a rather non-nice thing to say.

Furthermore, my request for a "citation" was supposed to be equivalent to asking for "any sort of rationale." You are interpreting that overly legalistically. I'm was just trying to have a conversation, OK? And I did it in a polite way. I would have been happy to hear a rationale that was not a citation per se. It would even have been OK for the person I was responding to to say, "I don't know, I just suspect it," or "I heard it anecdotally," or whatever.

> There's a related issue in the current scientific paradigm, fetishizing statistical p-values. People are so distracted by the veneer of a p-value (or a citation) that they forget to look for a plausible causal mechanism.

I agree, although that's not related to my behavior here.

I'm annoyed by the same thing you are, which is when people use "citation?" as though it's a counter-argument. But I wasn't doing that. I wish I had just said, "What's your rationale for saying that." But you know what? I can't predict when someone is going to misinterpret a perfectly reasonable and polite thing I've said.

I think the thing I was responding to is exactly the (rare) kind of thing where an actual citation probably is the kind of answer someone with a rationale would want to give, as opposed to a causal explanation or some other sort of evidence. So you're preaching to the choir, here. I get what you're saying, i.e., that many people ask for citations in a context where a citation doesn't really make sense (for example, a controversial medical claim where there are probably numerous studies that seem to disagree with one another). This just isn't that sort of context. I could see myself making the same point you are making in a different context. It annoys me to be lumped in with those people that you and I are both justifiably annoyed by.

> By the way, you still haven't explained your skepticism of the original statement you replied to.

I just don't think it's true. I know that cryptocurrency is being treated as a financial asset. I haven't seen evidence that extortion or fraud are a major fraction of what's going on with cryptocurrency. I have enough familiarity and experience with the field to think that my sense of this is probably correct.

Bitcoin is 66% of the market cap of cryptocurrency. It's clear that bitcoin is being used widely as a financial asset (it's available in multiple funds you can get in brokerage accounts, there are many high-volume OTC desks, there are derivatives, there is now lending). There is a lot of journalism showing that large sums of money are flowing into bitcoin as a financial asset; for example, the company MicroStrategy purchasing $425M of bitcoin, or Robinhood facilitating bitcoin trading, or GBTC accepting inflows of hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase bitcoin.

In contrast, I'm aware of ransomware, but I suspect it's probably a very small fraction of the bitcoin/cryptocurrency economy (but, as I said originally, I would be interested to see evidence contrary to that). My sense is that it's pretty hard to effectively launder money with cryptocurrency, unless you stay out of the US and Europe and parts of Asia, i.e., unless you stay in the places where it's already probably easier to launder money. But again, that's just my sense, so if someone has an explanation contrary to that, I'd be interested to see it, which is why I asked.

I view many of the smaller crypto coins as scams, so there is actually an interpretation of OP's statement that I agree with - I guess it depends on how you define "fraud" and "a huge fraction." Again, bitcoin is 66% and is clearly not a scam (though it would be fair to ask why that's clear if someone doesn't already know - but my answer right now would be, go research it yourself, I can't take the time to explain all that). Bitcoiners may be misguided or wrong, but it's not a scam.

You've confused a critique of your rhetoric for a critique of yourself. There's no need to defend a turn of phrase so vigorously. If you'd just led off with, "No, I didn't mean it like that," as you've done here, then I'd have shut up. I mean, come on, surely you recognize how "Do you have a citation?" falls into the camp that both of us apparently dislike.

Anyway, back to the topic of Bitcoin. I think your assessment is right in that the bulk of Bitcoin transactions are speculative investments. However, given that the value of Bitcoin as an asset lies in its assumed eventual use as a currency, the original comment might also be correct in that non-speculative transactions are predominantly related to illicit activities. I'm unaware of any common legitimate purpose beyond financial speculation.

When one thinks of world trade, there's (these numbers are from a faded memory of an international trade class about 2 decades ago, so they're horribly wrong) something like $50 billion in goods exported daily. That's the world economy. Then there's $500 billion in currency derivatives traded daily to ostensibly enable exports across currencies, but it's really just speculation. It's not real trade. So when someone talks about the Bitcoin economy, it's hard to know whether we should be talking about just the actual economic activity conducted using Bitcoin as a currency, or whether we should include the speculative trades as well.

> You've confused a critique of your rhetoric for a critique of yourself.

If you call my comment hypocritical, I think you're calling me hypocritical. Apparently you don't think so. That's fine. It could be a cultural difference. Let's not litigate it.

> There's no need to defend a turn of phrase so vigorously. If you'd just led off with, "No, I didn't mean it like that," as you've done here, then I'd have shut up.

I don't think this is a charitable thing to say. If there was no need for me to defend it, there was no need for you to "attack" (criticize) my comment in the first place. If you don't agree, that's fine. Again, let's not litigate it.

> I mean, come on, surely you recognize how "Do you have a citation?" falls into the camp that both of us apparently dislike.

I don't agree. As I already explained, I think it's OK to ask for a citation, in a certain context. I don't think I was doing the thing you're complaining about and which annoys me. If you disagree, that's fine. Let's not litigate it.

I would have liked for you to find a way to continue communicating without continuing to criticize, but it didn't happen. Oh well. Let's call this conversation finished. Take care. On the bitcoin stuff you are bringing up, that looks fine to me. I don't have anything more to say about that.

Yeah, it's interesting how similar our viewpoints are, including the stubborn itch to debate rhetoric. Have a good evening.