[jsemrau]

Not yet. The on and off-ramps are still way too complicated. Getting an account with one of the established banks (a.k.a exchanges) is painful. AML/KYC takes weeks, the user interface is a mess, every turn costs you "fees", trading is dominated by whales when they move their money around to pump some shit-err... alt-coin, and finally getting back into fiat so you can actually use all of the "in-game" currency is slow and expensive again. While I work on a crypto solution through my startup, the current state of affairs has still a lot of room to grow.

[prepend]

It’s weird how unusable my experience is. I recently tried to open a basic account with an exchange, Gemini, and after a few rounds of onboarding (all confusing and disjointed) I was kicked out of the process. My nascent account was closed with a confusing message.

After emailing I was told that they decided not to open my account for reasons they won’t state and there’s no appeal.

This was weird because I was a new customer with no transactions and all I had done was send a photo of my passport and enter KYC info.

All a bad experience and just shows it’s ridiculous compared to banks.

Banks have problems, but they do have regulators at least.

[mouzogu]

Yes, and in most cases you need a bank account or at least a debit card to buy crypto to begin with.

I'm long crypto but i think the argument of banking the unbanked is a bit contrived, much like the store of wealth narrative in the face of regular -20% "corrections".

It should be seen as a speculative investment and not really a currency. Perhaps stablecoins can serve that market eventually.

[jsemrau]

Quick update on this. While getting fiat into crypto is easy. I failed now for 2 weeks in a row to do the reverse. Binance should be avoided at all cost.

[bradwood]

On and off ramps are predicated on the necessity to transfer fiat into and out of crypto. This (some would argue) is just an intermediary state before _everything_ is crypto. In El Salvador, there is no need to off-ramp fiat into BTC...

[davidgerard]

> In El Salvador, there is no need to off-ramp fiat into BTC...

This is a functionally incorrect description of how the system is working there, or doesn't. In practice, the bitcoin systems there are tremendously unreliable, and the populace hates everything about it. I wrote this about how it's going: https://archive.is/mJY30

You could argue that none of what went wrong with it is "bitcoin" per se - but then, the "bitcoin" system that El Salvador actually has doesn't resemble what Nakamoto proposed in any way.

[bradwood]

> the populace hates everything about it

This sentence alone tells me everything I need to know about your position: "the populace" (implying everyone) and "everything" -- riiight... I think you need to tone down the superlatives a bit and maybe try researching both sides for your next article. A 1000 people marched against bitcoin -- this is hardly "the populace"...

There is no arguing that it (Chivo) got off to a shaky start... but we already know that Chivo has more users than the banks have fiat accounts in El Salvador.[1]

As to "bitcoin systems" -- it's just regular bitcoin and the lightning network and these are _global_ systems, not systems that are only "there"...

Finally, you just need logic to know that if something is sold in BTC, and you have a BTC wallet, you can buy something in BTC, using your BTC wallet, without needing fiat. Hence, fiat on/off ramps are obviously not needed to be able to be paid, and live, and save, and purchase stuff there.

[1]: https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1441846960332361730?s...

[davidgerard]

> we already know that Chivo has more users than the banks have fiat accounts in El Salvador.[1]

We know no such thing. 2.7m users is flatly implausible. That is, in fact, the number of downloads.

Chivo has refused to release the number of actually signed-up users. The customer service call centres are ghost towns. The government small business advisory service is telling businesses to install one of the other wallets (Bitcoin Beach or Muun) so they can be technically in compliance with Art. 7 of the Bitcoin Law, to charge the unsubsidised fees to the customer and not hand over the goods until the transaction has gone through.

Local newspapers (Elsalvador.com, El Faro) have detailed at length public complaints about the failures and unreliability of the Chivo network. I urge you to talk to some non-coiner Salvadorans and keep track of local coverage of how it's gone. I've been following this story closely since June and have been doing so.

If you don't want to trust my opinions, read Marc Falzon, @marcfalzon on Twitter - an ardent libertarian bitcoiner who went to El Salvador to see how all of this was actually working out, and discovered an absolute shitshow.

edit: and Bukele just claimed 65,000 transactions in the air in the system every second. If each transaction takes "several seconds" as he says, that's still a claim that Chivo does more business than the entire worldwide Visa network. Someone's feeding him numbers that sound good to him, even though they fall apart under the slightest examination. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1442624279028408321

[el-salvador]

I went to a shopping earlier earlier this week in El Salvador, and spoke to one of the cashiers about their experience with BTC while shopping.

"We have two Bitcoin payment processors, one from a private bank and another is the state owned wallet. We have had only two clients attempting to pay with bitcoin and both transactions failed. The state owned one has been down for most of the week, and the private bank app can't receive payments from the state owned one".

[jsemrau]

Yes, I'd hope that. At some point I'd like to buy milk with Banano's I earned from watching JungleTV.

[imtringued]

Why hasn't that happened? I can answer it very easily. Freicoin is a Bitcoin fork that has a holding fee to avoid speculation. Nobody used it. Nobody will use Bitcoin.