[gregjor]

Remittances to Argentinian citizens have nothing to do with capital controls put in place to prevent capital flight and exchange rate arbitrage, which involves money leaving Argentina, the opposite of remittances.

If an American wants to send money to someone in Argentina they have plenty of options that are cheaper and safer than Crypto: Wise, PayPal, Xoom, even Western Union.

If an Argentinian wants to evade capital control laws in their own country crypto may be their best option. Just calling it corrupt, as a foreigner, does not make it legal or ethical.

[csdvrx]

I'm afraid you have absolutely no idea about what you are talking about, especially for the people in Argentina. Read about the Blue Dollar.

[gregjor]

From https://bluedollar.net:

> Blue Dollar AKA Dolar Blue or unofficial dollar is parallel dollar rate of USD in Argentina. This is the cost of buying and selling a physical dollar bill in a cueva, or clandestine financial house in Buenos Aires. This is the best price you’ll get if you are buying or selling physical bills, and the transaction is done with no involvement of any government-sanctioned or licensed entity (like a bank).

What does exchanging physical dollar bills in Argentina have to do with remittances, or crypto? Many countries have informal or black markets for exchanging currencies, separate from the official exchange rates. That is not the same as remittances unless you are sending envelopes of dollars to someone in Argentina. My comment responds to the claim "Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now," which simply isn't true, not even to Argentina.

[csdvrx]

> What does exchanging physical dollar bills in Argentina have to do with remittances, or crypto?

That, who would have guessed, there are places who'll happily convert the crypto remittances at the Blue rate. So the people you send money to will get more money, while you'll send the same amount, just in a different way.

And the people receiving money, would would guess that, will be happier by receiving more money instead of less :)

[gregjor]

This can work without crypto. I haven't sent dollars to Argentina, but I (US citizen) have lived in a country with currency controls and artificial exchange rates. And I pay a freelancer who lives in a SE Asian country with currency controls and and poor official USD exchange rates (i.e. an informal market for dollars). I pay that guy in USD through PayPal or Wise, and he transfers from the USD account to someone who changes to local currency at the street rate (equivalent to Blue Dollar in the country he lives in). The transaction fees are low and the process is fast, almost instant. I could pay him with crypto if he asked, but he hasn't, because it's easier to just transfer USD. He still has to figure out how to convert USD to his currency at the best rate, a problem he would still have if I paid with BTC.

Reading the Blue Dollar web site I noticed that Argentina recently started taxing crypto transactions, which means the government is requiring exchanges to report those transactions, like they already do for USD transactions.

[csdvrx]

> Reading the Blue Dollar web site I noticed that Argentina recently started taxing crypto transactions, which means the government is requiring exchanges to report those transactions, like they already do for USD transactions

I seriously doubt that people who already use the unofficial exchange rate will use the official exchanges for crypto...

[gregjor]

Apparently crypto remittances are a bigger thing than I thought:

https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...

A reply with useful information works better than writing that someone absolutely doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but your comment did spur me to look more into the subject.

[csdvrx]

Then I'm happy you gained something from our conversation!

I made my initial reply because the amount of disinformation about crypto on HN is frightening.

You may want to incorporate that to your "reading lens" priors when reading dismissive information here: there is a large probability the person has no idea what they are talking about, and is simply repeating something.

And BTW it's not a value judgement, as repeating stuff that's true is good, valuable, and a valid default heuristic for most other topics on HN.