[fruitzome]

2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them.

I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin.

Many other people are censored.

Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation.

Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)

[dlp211]

So these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market?

Call me a skeptic.

[jcranmer]

It's staggering to think that these bitcoin enthusiasts have never heard of M-Pesa or other similar systems. Note that these systems work with dumbphones, which is useful because (I believe) almost all of the mobile phone penetration in places like Africa are dumbphones, not smartphones.

[psychedelic]

You've never visited Africa, have you?

[cachvico]

Yes. The implication is that the 2B unbanked will get access to a cheap Android, and therefore ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees, before the banana state fixes their massively corrupt government.

[acdha]

> ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees

Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?

[cachvico]

Ethereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network).

There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.

[acdha]

Fast and cheap are still not synonyms for instant and free but that’s at least possibly closer to one day being competitive with the existing mobile systems.

Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.

[fruitzome]

A lot of the world lives on less than $2 a day.

You can buy a cheap refurbished Android phone for $5.

And you have SMS cointext.io to transact for instance.

You do not need a hardware wallet, only to memorize the 12 word seed phrase.

Just look at the set of users who have phones without adequate banking. You will see this is measured in the billions of people.

The best hope to lift people out of poverty is for us to transact and deal with these people.

[KirinDave]

The amount of your transactions doesn't matter. If chains can't give people individual transactions in a trustless environment WITHOUT just recreating a new set of banking networks to bridge you onto the lightning network, all we've done is rotate the moneyhandlers.

Maybe that's great for your pocketbook. To me it seems pointless and worthy of scorn.

[KirinDave]

Bitcoin is sooooo important that everyone has devised an alternative off-chain protocol that actually does peer-to-peer scaling and in no way actually needs bitcoin except as a reconciliation strategy.

Yeah wow, we're all impressed.

[zodiac]

What's wrong with off-chain scaling?

[KirinDave]

Nothing, unless you have an agenda to make the blockchain relevant. I don't, so I do all my scaling off-chain.

[zodiac]

I'm confused by this, as well as by your parent comment. Could you make your claims more directly so I can understand them?

[KirinDave]

What's the point of having a chain at all? It's not a unqiue or prigiledged BFT solution. It has some nice but not essential properties.

If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.

[zodiac]

> What's the point of having a chain at all?

Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated.

> If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain

Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium. So that when I "pay" you some money in a payment channel you really have received it in a certain sense, and offchain payments are basically as secure as on chain ones.

[TheCoelacanth]

Right, people buying something for $2 in rural Africa can afford to pay a $30 fee to make that transaction happen. They definitely don't use something like M-Pesa instead.

[Retra]

What are you buying from rural South Africa that's worth $2?

[fruitzome]

It's none of your business.

But there was some music I paid for online because I liked the sound.

It's awesome that I'm able to support artists and creators across the globe and make a difference in someone's life (as they made a difference in mine).

Transaction cost? 1 cent with Bitcoin Cash. They kept $1.99