Yes, it's certainly not a viable option for mass-market business. But there are niches where such OPSEC is standard practice. Some, such as drugs and arms dealing, were huge well before Bitcoin. Also hosting services for spam and botnets.
What Silk Road and Bitcoin demonstrated is the huge popularity of dark markets for retail drug sales. With product authenticity and seller reliability attested through customer reviews. And without risk of meatspace violence (except if busted, of course).
And sure, that stuff is still widely illegal. However, when laws are ignored by substantial minorities, their legitimacy becomes questionable. African Americans didn't end segregation in the US through petitioning legislatures. They broke the laws, creating a crisis, and forcing the federal government to act. Lesbian and gay activists did much the same, at least initially.
Given that even payment processors like Stripe are removing it because the verification time is too long, it is sadly not satisfying solution in any way.
Also, again, good luck getting any b2b when you tell them they need to pay in bitcoin only.
Stripe removed it primarily because they got almost no adoption (most merchants I know using stripe weren’t even aware they offered it; merchants had to opt in).
Verification times are clearly an engineering problem, not a fundamental issue. Long-term solutions are currently under experimentation (lightning, DAG currencies, etc.)
Luckily that's no longer an issue now that interest has faded and the mempool has cleared. Also, reducing on-chain transactions (and thus keeping the mempool clear, on-chain fees low, and verification times low) is pretty much the main use case of Lightening Network. The massive rise in fees and tx congestion was caused by the massive interest in BTC at the end of 2017. Something tells me if you are doing B2B in a shady jurisdiction, the companies you are doing work with would be more than willing to jump through hoops to deal exclusively in BTC
Yes, that's been a benefit of the collapse in speculative interest. Now transactions are affordable again. And regardless of Bitcoin's eventual fate, I'm rather confident that something like it or better will be available ongoingly.
Not necessarily. One can earn cryptocurrencies. That's especially so for coders and such. But yes, conversion with "real money" is problematic.
For small amounts, meatspace trades are doable using LocalBitcoins.com etc. For huge amounts, I suspect that expert assistance is available. It's the middle ground that's nontrivial.
I'm interested to see if the US is able to do anything to Bitfinex now as a litmus test to see how wide their reach is in 2018. As far as I know they have zero US presence, and don't offer services to US customers.
BTC-e went down hard for example. But they had some much more obvious links with criminal enterprise.
Although even if it is possible to stay outside of the reach of the US, losing access to the international banking system is quite the handicap for any business.
Good luck with that, unless your vision of doing business doesn't involve ever charging customers, especially for b2b.