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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

#91

Post by anonporridge »

el-salvador wrote: post #64
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…

I've tested the lightning in El Salvador to lightning payments and they work in 4/5 seconds in the merchants that accept them. There's also the local wallet QR codes which I haven't had the opportunity to try yet The volatility is what I like the least. Like one day realizing that the Wendy's hamburger I had for dinner was well timed, because a few hours later Bitcoin's value dropped. In El Salvador we've had an stab…

All true, however, by using the dollar as your primary currency, you are effectively a vassal state of the United States, your currency getting regularly devalued without getting any direct benefit of that devaluation like American citizens get, and also no representation in the government that controls that implicit tax that is currency debasement.

I'm not Salvadorian, so it's obviously not my place to say what you should do. But I don't see being a second class nation state, in implicit subjugation to the currently dominant global superpower to be a terribly stable state to be in for the long view of human civilization.

But then again, that's one of the more insidious effects of bad currency. It forces people into short term thinking because the value of their savings bleeds away so quickly in time. Those people who don't subscribe to storing their money in weak currencies tend to take a longer term perspective on life.

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

#92

Post by kgwgk »

lostmsu wrote: post #88
kgwgk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, the point is that "cryptocurrencies have claimed" almost everything under the Sun - to the extent that it makes sense to say that "cryptocurrencies have claimed" anything at all.

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

#93

Post by lottin »

valcron1000 wrote: post #36
pavlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are no fees or middlemen in crypto. Never mind that it costs $50 worth in fees to send a penny on Ethereum, and I need to convert my money to casino tokens on some scammy exchange first.

You can use any other blockchain. Why pick Ethereum?

It doesn't matter, all blockchains work the same way. They all depend on middlemen to process transactions.

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

#94

Post by anonporridge »

lottin wrote: post #84
anonporridge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. The energy is expended to create the strongest immutability guarantee and DDOS resistance of any distributed system ever created by humanity.

Distribution of new coins and transactions fees are simply the reward for that service.

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

#96

Post by everfree »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54
shafyy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Sending USD or EUR (or any other currency) to Ukraine is very simple. You can go to their funding page, enter your credit card, and you're done. Then they've got money they can actually use. What are they doing with all the crypto? Did they convert it to fiat? Is it just sitting there? The only reason so many cryptos were sent is because there a lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, th…

> lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass I'm also assuming those donors will try to write off their crypto at imaginary prices and hope the IRS doesn't notice.

Why would you think that's likely?

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

#97

Post by miohtama »

tablespoon wrote: post #69
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 they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. Uh, what now? They actually do a worse job than traditional finance. What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver? Why I dispute the transaction and get my money back. It's less important that I have absolute trust in the vendor, because I ha…

> What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver?

You are paying 2% - 5% premium on the price for this insurance that a credit card company providers. This is what the merchant gets charged in transaction fees and flat fees to get access to Visa/Mastercard network. There are many cases when you do not want to have insurance benefits of credit cardand you would simply take 2% cheaper price. However, with the current consumer payment rails (credit/debit) this is in practice impossible. (Granted some large enterprises like Amazon get charged less, but economics of scale, combined with the business practices, of Amazon have been found to be harmful for ecommerce ecosystem as a whole.)

I think it is ok to let the free market to pick the winner. Cryptocurrency might not be an ideal solution for all problems, but it might be still a good solution especially in developing countries where banking system is expensive, inefficient and corrupt. Let the option be available for others even if you do not use or believe in it yourself.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

tablespoon wrote: post #69
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 they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. Uh, what now? They actually do a worse job than traditional finance. What happens if I pay for something with a credit card and the vendor fails to deliver? Why I dispute the transaction and get my money back. It's less important that I have absolute trust in the vendor, because I ha…

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by everfree »

dmitriid wrote: post #28
seibelj wrote: post #3

Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.

> Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. No. Crypto sent a bunch of meaningless novelty coins to a country that has no chance in hell of converting them into food, water, transportation etc.

If that's true, then why did their government solicit people to send them these "meaningless novelty coins" on social media? Just for fun?

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

#100

Post by bb88 »

lottin wrote: post #84
anonporridge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, value has been removed from BTC and sent to the energy companies mostly.
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