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Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

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Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#81

Post by kgwgk »

mkdirp wrote: post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

> Cryptocurrencies have never claimed

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed anything - and never will.

Proponents of cryptocurrencies, however, have claimed an impressively large number of things - often contradictory.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#82

Post by bb88 »

everfree wrote: post #75
bb88 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't trust stable coins. I can't trust the price of BTC to drop to $0 when speculators panic. I can't trust that my BTC will be accepted if it was once tied to a money laundering (mixer) address. I can't trust that I will not be rug pulled on any new coin unless I read the fine grained software contract, first. I can't trust a software contract from being hacked unless I can hire a software contract expert to peru…

> I can't trust stable coins. Why not?

"Reputational Risk" is a term bandied about in the banking industry when it comes to holding people's money.

While USDC does indeed look better, the management failure of holding corporate bonds in lieu of treasuries and dollars would have triggered an audit in a bank, and would have been big news.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/coinbase...

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#83

Post by everfree »

verdverm wrote: post #18
anonporridge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency…

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

I believe cryptocurrency networks can still be useful even if "most" transactions are priced in fiat and settled in stablecoins.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#84

Post by lottin »

anonporridge wrote: post #26
verdverm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.

I think this is a problem until it isn't. The first country that starts pricing its oil exports in bitcoin will a) cause the price to initially skyrocket, and b) create a stabilizing force on the price that percolates to all other goods and services. And the interesting thing, is that because bitcoin is energy money, there is a very direct and explicit correlation to the amount of bitcoin you can earn from using your…

> bitcoin is energy money

Bitcoin isn't energy anything. The energy required to print bitcoins has been expended in the process of printing the bitcoins.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#85

Post by randomhodler84 »

bb88 wrote: post #65
jfk13 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that ordinary people will (reliably, securely, safely) manage their own cryptocurrency holdings without using an exchange (or similar service) is ludicrous. This is blind techno-utopianism at its worst, and does nothing for humanity or society.

Further you need to trust the devs writing the algorithms as well. BTC forked shifting much of the value of BTC onto another blockchain. If it happens again, you have to remain vigilant to recoup your value.

Give it up. Bcash is worthless. The value is absolutely in the real Bitcoin, BTC. Bcash is and always a scam that only fools fell for.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#86

Post by JumpCrisscross »

anonporridge wrote: post #67
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because bitcoin is energy money This is mostly nonsense. Energy provides a consistent price floor for mining Bitcoin. That has little relevance to its traded price. If energy prices triple, that doesn't mean Bitcoin prices have to triple as well. It just makes mining at lower prices unprofitable. If nobody wants to buy Bitcoins at the breakeven price, mining just stops--it doesn't magic demand into existence.

Mining energy use and the price of bitcoin are co-integrated. They play off each other. An increase in price incentivizes more mining and more mining increases the security of the system, which incentivizes more money to flow into and stay in bitcoin. Also, as miners become a larger industrial complex and tightly coupled to electricity producers, they become a tightly integrated piece of civilization that has funds l…

> where in order to buy energy you need to have bitcoin, there is no "buying" bitcoin

So when you say "bitcoin is energy money," that's a tautology. It's energy money if oil is priced in bitcoin.

> that doesn't depend on the enforcement of the monopoly on violence

Violence relieves someone of their Bitcoin keys just as easily as it does their dollars or gold. (At the very least, you can permanently sequester them.)

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#87

Post by motohagiography »

That Senegalese fisherman, if he were in Kenya, Uganda, or Ghana is probably already using M-Pesa on his feature phone. The article seems to present "inclusion," to mean "supervision," which is actually pretty acurate in general, but that whole narrative is so insincere as to be uncanny.

Wave is welcome to tilt at windmills, but they should also recognize that this kind of posturing deserves any pillorying it may get.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#88

Post by lostmsu »

kgwgk wrote: post #81
mkdirp wrote: post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

> Cryptocurrencies have never claimed Cryptocurrencies have never claimed anything - and never will. Proponents of cryptocurrencies, however, have claimed an impressively large number of things - often contradictory.

Groups of people may claim contradictory things, and yet consist of individuals having consistent stories.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#89

Post by mumblemumble »

mkdirp wrote: post #31

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them…

> Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust.

I would argue it's closer to the opposite. Cryptocurrency solves the question, "How do you operate a shared ledger in the absence of trust?"

I, sitting in my cushy home in the USA, with my cushy American, NCUA-insured accounts at a fiscally conservative credit union, don't have that problem. I get to benefit from a regulatory environment that has done a quite good job of directly solving the problem of trust for the vast majority of its participants, so that we don't need expensive, complex trustless cryptographic ledgers to manage our electronic assets.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#90

Post by everfree »

reactspa wrote: post #5

It's one of the most financially *exclusionary* concepts ever created. There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. Aside 1: as big of a joke the ori…

> There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices.

Sounds just like the VC land-grab when investing in a hot new tech startup, and the subsequent dumping on the public at ICO.

But just like with stocks, nobody "needs" to buy crypto. If a company produces something useful to you, you can capture value as a customer without owning the stock. If a company ever uses blockchain technology to produce something useful to you, at that point you will be able to capture value as a customer without owning crypto.

> The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories.

It's easy to create an infinite number of companies, but not all company stocks trade at the same value.

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