[zwkrt]

So to summarize, it is useful for variously exfiltrating money out of a country, laundering, and for people who are savvy enough to use crypto but not sensible enough to have a bank account.

The point about currency collapse is interesting to me, because (like almost all crypto apologist points) it assumes you already have a bunch of it/made a bunch of money on it before the bad thing happens. Everyone else gets to suck eggs, as the saying goes.

Of course if everyone in the hypothetical country had crypto, it would cause the crypto to collapse as well…

[ggeorgovassilis]

> So to summarize, it is useful for variously exfiltrating money out of a country, laundering

Summarizing & paraphrasing :-) Greece instated capital controls virtually over night, likely illegally as there is freedom of capital movement in the EU [1]. The money on a bank account resides in a particular country, so its legislation applies. Which country's legislation applies to funds in a globally distributed blockchain, whose copies reside all over the globe?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-33303540

edited for spelling

[sjducb]

Currencies rarely collapse instantly. You've usually got months to years of warning. Lots of time for people to get their cash out.

If you were Lebanese I would argue that having a bank account was a silly thing to do. Foreign bank accounts were illegal/difficult and domestic bank accounts are now worthless. You could own crypto or some kind of real good, such as a warehouse full of a commodity like wheat or diesel. Those are your options for hanging on to your wealth.

[ploppyploppy]

The vast majority of the planet have no access to the banking infrastructure the west and developed nations have.

Bitcoin fixes that and removes the middlemen.