[me551ah]

Crypto works for what use case exactly? Crypto payments take much longer time than traditional credit card ones , are barely supported by most websites and in many cases cost more in transaction fees than credit cards.

And with a lot of people storing their money in these major crypto banks , what we now have is a fairly centralised structure which kind of defeats the purpose of crypto. Worse, these banks also hold each other’s tokens similar to what your normal banks do. And if that’s not enough some of them even do fractional reserves and use the real money they get for investing.

[rabite]

Perhaps for the use case of the underbanked, which is the majority of the world. That I need to wait for confirmation on the blockchain for a crypto payment is orders of magnitude faster than my other option, which is wait for someone to manually bring in foreign currencies by train. My country is not on SWIFT. My passport will not allow me to get a bank account in any country that would let me process credit cards. I am not allowed to use Paypal.

This kind of comment is the epitome of the Western privilege -- your governments cut off entire countries from the banking system, deny their own citizens access to banks because of their political beliefs, and then tout the alleged superiority of your credit cards, which are now denied to truckers and Kanye West by the same companies that were happy to do business with Pornhub when they were knowingly facilitating the monetization of child sex slaves.

Credit cards and United States dollars are the tools of thieves, thugs, rapists, and warmongers. Bitcoin works for the use case of not staining your hands with the blood and tears of their victims, at the very least.

[me551ah]

I'm from India, one of the most populous countries in the world. And we have instant online transfers with no transaction fee and it's called UPI.

[rabite]

That's not what we were discussing. Here's your quote:

> Crypto payments take much longer time than traditional credit card ones

Everyone in India can process an American credit card? Indians are magically immune from political censorship on the basis of the payment card associations?

[kevinak]

Is everyone in India banked? How do you transfer money outside of the India? Can you do that insta fly with UPI as well?

There are more countries than India, I’d suggest maybe taking a look at South America, Africa and Asia.

[ipython]

This argument always intrigued me. Once you point out cryptocurrencies don’t actually solve the unbanked problem for poor people, then the use case immediately shifts to “well have you tried to move seven figures between countries”?

By the way many African countries have a robust mobile phone based banking infrastructure. Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. See https://qz.com/africa/2161960/gsma-70-percent-of-the-worlds-... for example.