[amiraliakbari]

As the CTO of a local exchange in Iran, I can confirm that many average people here are using cryptocurrencies for many reasons including countering inflation. We even have farmers and other low-tech workers using our platform. Buying USD is not that easy here and many people simply use an exchange to buy and save crypto, without needing to do any on-chain transaction at all. Many use crypto when local stock market is not doing good for having profit on their normal savings. Even a non-trivial percent of our users identify themselves as full-time traders. Additionally because of US sanctions many are using crypto to transfer funds to their relatives over the borders, buy games/VPS/VPN/etc, receive remote salaries, or even accept donations for completing GitHub issues.

The local or the US government may oppose some of these actions and consider it illegal, but many normal people just use crypto to have a better life regardless, using their hard-earned money, for normal savings or completely ethical personal financial purposes. Those who want to launder money or evade taxes already had access to more efficient ways and presumably are still using them.

[littlestymaar]

> Buying USD is not that easy here and many people simply use an exchange to buy and save crypto, without needing to do any on-chain transaction at all.

So people are using IRR to buy “crypto” on an Iranian exchange, without any on-chain transaction? Does the said exchange even have real crypto backing these accounts? If so, how did they buy it, since there's probably no-one out of Iran that would offer bitcoin or anything against rial.

On a side note, because the majority of today's use of crypto is intermediated by exchanges (which are banks, really) I'd really love to know how “leveraged”[1] they are: that is, how much of the crypto there customers have on their bank account they actually own on-chain. It could still be 1/1 at this point, but it would be surprising given they have no regulatory requirements and it's such an easy way to make money.

[1]: yes, I know, this isn't the proper term, but I just can't recall it right now.

[amiraliakbari]

The parent mentioned high transaction fees, that for some people may equal their whole savings. For these people, the best option is just to trust the exchange. But people with even moderate sums can and do transfer their cryptos to their own wallets. We support multiple networks and withdraw methods and transfer fees can be as low as less than a dollar. In fact our daily deposit and withdraw rates are usually comparable.

Is the crypto real and backed? As far as our exchange (the biggest in the local market) is concerned, totally yes. Aside from matching local request and demand and local mining, there are big providers that can provide USDT/USD inside or outside Iran. Then you can exchange them on many international exchanges ignoring all limitations. As I said above, there are many traditional ways of bypassing laws/sanctions and big players actively use them. The cryptocurrencies and exchanges are just creating platforms for ordinary people to have access to it.

There are inevitably “banks” and large holders/miners/etc, but the best thing about crypto is that anyone can be their own bank and trust no other person, or even mine their own money. Just as you can setup your own blog as well as using big platforms.

The regulation is in its early stages, but even here exchanges use KYC to prevent really bad actions like laundering stolen money. The trust is also more reputation based than regulation based. If an exchange is operating for a long time with known founders, and was able to satisfy all withdraw requests even in low markets when everybody was getting their money out, people tend to trust it. Our users usually do not even tolerate a minute of downtime. But of course good regulation (if there is such a thing and governments are agile enough to provide it) can help to prevent frauds that may happen in any market, including crypto. But probably making everyone more knowledgeable, with a light supporting regulation, is a better approach to preventing fraud.

[littlestymaar]

> As I said above, there are many traditional ways of bypassing laws/sanctions and big players actively use them. The cryptocurrencies and exchanges are just creating platforms for ordinary people to have access to it.

I love how casually you're bragging about “delivering money laundering and corruption to the masses”. I sincerely hope you end up in jail some day.

[amiraliakbari]

It is just normal consumers doing things that are already accepted, even if not explicitly declared. For taking any substantial amount of money out of a bank anywhere in the world, there are tight controls and nobody can sell oil or deliver large stolen money trough crypto. But how it is different that a person can directly buy an Xbox game with crypto instead of buying it from a reseller? The reseller already did the same thing - somehow move USD to another country, buy the game and sell it inside the country. I'm saying that the crypto is just removing some proxies and traditional processes and is not providing any new way of doing bad things that were not possible before crypto.

It's like saying that Uber is causing global warming. If you really care about global warming, just regulate using cars and force EV. If for whatever reason no one cares about regulating cars and everybody already uses them, disallowing an electronic method of renting cars does not fix any real problems.

If you think anyone cares about these use cases, why a company like Apple does not simply block Iranian network providers on iPhones to prevent any illegal selling of iPhones here? There are a many many people in Iran that are using iPhones and other products that are not supposed to be used here, all of which are imported using the same methods that I said exists and are being used. Does allowing use of such products "money laundering and corruption" and you are hoping for Apple managers to end up in jail? The services I said are being used are all of the the same kind, normal services used by normal people. That's not even considering the debate that does a country like USA has the right to define what is a crime in another country or not.

[littlestymaar]

There's a pretty big difference between “not actively policing your market to avoid money laundering” and “creating a business dedicated to money laundering”. We can argue that the first is irresponsible (because most of the times, the company is aware of what's happening) but the second one is in another league.

And I don't really know why you bring the USA here, this isn't harming them in any ways (Otherwise, you can be sure that iPhones would be bricked there for instance), this is harming Iran.