Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport

The markets get busted (or become scams), the dealers not so much. If you’re on these markets regularly for years you’re probably communicating directly with sellers at this point.

While Visa is often mentioned in discussions about cryptocurrencies, it's important to understand that it's not a direct counterpart. Visa is not a currency. Visa serves as a payment network, akin to Paypal. These platforms can, and in some instances such as Paypal, do support transactions in cryptocurrencies alongside fiat currencies.

In the realm of fiat currency, the closest analogue to owning a Bitcoin or Ethereum account might be holding physical cash or digitally, maintaining an account at a Federal Reserve Bank. However, the latter is rare and nearly impossible to establish, making it accessible only to exceptionally large banking institutions. A more common comparison might be that having a regular bank account is similar to having a custodial cryptocurrency account (e.g. on an exchange, PayPal, RobinHood, etc.), as it represents a method of holding without possessing the currency directly.

Regarding the 25 million figure, it's difficult to know with certainty but it is very likely that the figure understates the amount of users, as custodial accounts tend to be more common and they do not result in new on-chain addresses. Also, I'm not sure where the figure comes from because for Bitcoin alone, there are over 40 million addresses with at least 1$[0].

> has nothing to do with helping regular people, the oppressed, the unbanked, whatever.

As someone who was unbanked for a long time, and having talked to many people in that situation (most recently a couple of Russian immigrants), you are talking out of your ass here.

[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

> As someone who was unbanked for a long time, and having talked to many people in that situation (most recently a couple of Russian immigrants), you are talking out of your ass here.

I think you missed my overall point. What I'm saying is that a transaction settlement value nearly equal to Visa is not primarily made up of these kinds of use cases. Obviously it's impossible to get real data on it but as a portion of transaction volume and value this valid (to me) use case almost certainly makes up infinitesimally small fractions of a percent of these transactions and value.

I have several friends that have fled civil wars and extremely unfavorable conditions. The (unfortunately) classic story of fleeing a country for your safety, leaving everything behind, and having to economically start over from zero in the US. In one example, I have a friend who's family was very wealthy in a country experiencing a brutal civil war in the 1980s. When their parents got to the US they were forced to take minimum wage jobs and the family lived in what was essentially poverty. They're alive but I cannot imagine what that must have been like. They talk about how jarring and terrible it was to this day and it was clearly one of the more traumatic aspects of the experience.

Do we all wish cryptocurrencies were available to them 40 years ago? I know I do. However, this runs into at least two gigantic problems in practice.

Let's say I flee from Ukraine today and get to the US with $100k of crypto currencies after I was (somehow) able to liquidate some portion of my wealth and get it on chain. Now I'm in the US. How, exactly, am I going to get it into the financial system? Once I get my documents, etc, in order I would imagine showing up to an off-ramp (like Coinbase) as a recent immigrant/refugee/asylum seeker and trying to end up with even $10k in a US bank account is going to be challenging to say the least. Again assuming I could somehow get this value on chain in the first place...

Granted this isn't an inherent fault of cryptocurrencies but it is how the real world works today in terms of the absolutely necessary on-ramps and off-ramps to the larger financial system where funds can actually be utilized. There's only so much you're going to be able to get out of a shady gas station bitcoin ATM with 15% fees. Is even $1 better than $0? Yes. Is a bank, the IRS, etc going to take issue with more significant amounts? Absolutely. Is that fair? Unfortunately, kind of. Ideally there would be some kind of program to validate this use case and source of funds similar to the process used for people to claim asylum. However, talk to anyone who has gone through that... Just being able to get into and stay in the country is a long and arduous process when you're not also bringing funds in some cryptocurrency long associated with criminality, fraud, etc.

What should/would be the process for validating the source of these funds to ensure I'm not actually some part of that oppressive government, a warlord, "terrorist", etc? It's a valid use case in theory but given the lack of ability to use cryptocurrencies directly for nearly all daily needs I'm very skeptical of the real utility.

Back to my concluding point: it's touted a lot by cryptocurrency proponents but mentioning it at the same time as pointing to a source talking about settling 11 trillion dollars of transactions is bizarre to say the least. The people pointing to this use case are, as you say, "talking out of their ass" and repeating a talking point used by cryptocurrency proponents as reference to one valid use case that is sympathetic to the rest of the population who otherwise generally has a very negative view of cryptocurrencies.

I was with you until "pay a fraction of a penny for a page view". Trying to push the web back into the closed pay for access model is something that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths. I'd say it's only a positive thing if it's funding new nodes working to route around existing attempts at artificial scarcity (to drive the price to within an epsilon of zero). But given the way the legal shakedown regime works we know it won't actually play out that way.

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