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by witweb 1935 days ago
So people living in countries without a stable currency due to hyperinflation don't count as a real use case? It's sometimes the only way they can secure their capital. I think that we need to think outside of our elitist western bubble more often. Not all people live in a stable democracy with (semi-)stable currencies.
3 comments

But for them there are better alternatives to BTC, one being BCH for example
And even if they do use BTC (they don't really, at least in Africa, i don't know about Venezuela), they do not trade using BTC but a second layer anyway.
This is either an uninformed or misleading take.

It isn't necessarily "Africa" or "Americas".

The heuristic is "is my local fiat shitcoin stealing my purchasing power".

Counter to your claim and easily provable with a basic search Nigeria is one of, if not the leading in BTC adoption %.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/nigeria-is-the-second-l...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194735/bitcoin-online-s...

Is it the shitcoin or is it the fact that the economy itself is gone and thus your currency isn't worth anything because nobody is selling things to you?

Here is an interesting article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas...

BCH is trending to 0 in BTC. How does this solve Venezuelans or Lebanese store of value problem?

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/

Yet they just passed BTC's daily transaction volume (regularly) . Like it or not, BCH is about to eat BTC's lunch and good for them. They've earned it.
SoV first and only then medium of exchange. Not the other way around.
That is because BTC extremely unstable, which is good for speculation but not for a currency
BTC isn't a stable currency in case you haven't noticed. Do you actually have evidence of BTC being used as currency in any of these dysfunctional countries you talk about or is it just a supposition that you're making?
In Venezuela, BTC is heavily restricted towards friends of the regime, for whom it serves similar experience as having hoards of "hard foreign currency" did in USSR...
They say nobody uses it but a "tiny minority". So basically what we already knew, BTC adoption as a currency is anecdotal even in those dysfunctional places where according to its proponents it's particularly suited for.
The article you linked to is from 2016 so I found something more recent: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-adoption-venezuela-research

The article I linked to is from crypto folks, so caveat emptor.

What we need is a global organization that ensures that every nation will be self sufficient in regards to nutrition and only imports non essential foods for varieties sake.

That's how you solve hyperinflation. The problem isn't that the currency is bad. The problem is that the government is utter garbage and since when did Bitcoin market itself as a political tool to subvert authoritarian leadership? No, it's just another "currency" like the dollar.