| My trouble with the argument that crypto will liberate underprivileged classes in general is that it seems to miss key holistic issues I'm enumerating below. Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'd appreciate knowing the way I'm wrong. 1. Crypto wealth only translates into real wealth if there is either (a) vendors who accept native crypto as tender or (b) there are exchanges that convert from crypto to authorized legal tender in a country. However, it seems (a) has not happened in a meaningful scale without (b), and (b) has been frustrated because of underlying price volatility, high fees, low transaction processing compared to traditional finance, etc. There's the problem of "too many cryptocurrencies" which frustrates user choice. (I'm aware independent proposals to "fix" all of this have been proposed, but there don't seem to be any clear winners e.g. stablecoins should have "fix"ed price volatility, but the leading stablecoin - TerraCoin - collapsed.) The net impact of this is that people are cut off from real-world markets they live in. Someone who has no access to traditional finance will not have an easier time purchasing goods and essentials with crypto wealth, and this their ability to participate is only marginally improved. 2. Crypto has higher barrier to entry than traditional finance because it requires higher than usual technical literacy, which people in these classes don't have. Wallets need protection, smart contracts need auditing, and so on. I would struggle getting people to use (say) hardware tokens. 3. There's nothing ultimately stopping governments from banning crypto exchanges or crypto vendors or more if they really want to prevent the disenfranchised from getting some. They might not eliminate the network, but they can certainly go after people for suspicion of participation in it (such as vendors). The crypto model requires governments to be foiled by technical limitations, but this is rarely the technique they need. Based on all of this, it seems like basically you need to solve the problem of vendors really caring enough about crypto for regular folks to get an advantage when the advantage is not clear. Is this not the case? What have I missed? |