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Being in a third-world country and part of the crypto community feels so liberating. You can feel the difference between you and a non-crypto person.
There’s always that one guy: > “That’s my reputation,” Baasiri said. “Gravity fucks the market.” 5% commissions on transactions though, that’s really steep!
Businesses in the developed world pay visa and mc and amex close to 3%.
Being in a third-world country and part of the crypto community feels so liberating. You can feel the difference between you and a non-crypto person.
How is it different? How many goods and services can you pay for with cryptocurrency where you live? What if your government's goons (or private goons for that matter) hit you with a rubber hose and steal your coins? Who will help you?
On what basis do they hit you? Anyone that ever has any link to crypto? That's everyone. Crypto has a level of security and plausible deniability, that makes such things unrealistic. That's why you don't hear about it happening often.
To many people under these regimes, there is much more security afforded to them by crypto than by their governments and currencies.
Let's say you build the perfect monetary policy into a cryptocurrency. Okay, now the basic institution of money is working again but what about everything else? >Over the last two years, Lebanon has been gripped by an economic death spiral, the culmination of years of government corruption and mismanagement. The electricity supply has collapsed, pharmacies and gas stations are empty, The article mentions infrastructu…
Infrastructure generally starts out private and gets nationalized over time.
I guess that a similar story could have happened to Greece. Nice to hear that crypto is helping people in such dire need of economic stability, although it was not clear from the article what happens to the lebanese cash that was used to purchase USDT. Someone must be left holding the bag, there must be some FX liquidity that they tap into?
They are purchasing using hard cash (ie USD) outside Lebanon and then transferred there. The article is a bit confusing but this is the key bit:
An agent in Nigeria will collate these sums, buy USDT, and send it to one of the top-level suppliers in Lebanon. Once they have sold it on, they will disburse cash to the originally intended recipient of the remittance.
It's a way to transfer USD (value) to your family in Lebanon. The dealer in Lebanon gets Tether (from the agent in Nigera), and gives cash USD to the family in Lebanon, minus their commission.
The Lebanese pound is never used.
Lebanon has a pretty large diaspora outside of the country (and with income in real currencies). And the current government is pretty corrupt. I wonder if the best strategy here isn't for the diaspora to just buy back the country for pennies on the dollar during the current collapse.
Edit: Judging by the downvotes, people aren't aware that Hezbollah is a major political party in Lebanon holding 13 seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_political_activities
They also have their own private army:
The Taif Agreement signed in October 1989 to end of the Lebanese civil war, besides other things, called for the disarmament of all national and non-national militias. Hezbollah was allowed to stay armed in its capacity as a "resistance force" rather than a militia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_political_activities...
That's not how it works. Cryptocurrency is not geographically bound.