[dkirill]

I don’t understand your point. Are you implying that people don’t have access to western finance because they are not sophisticated enough? If you don’t luck into being born with good citizenship lots of things you might take for granted are inaccessible. It has nothing to do with level of sophistication

[jeromegv]

The point is that people who were the most impacted of the fall of FTX and all those others exchanges are actually people in developing countries that lost ALL their savings. It was perhaps a few thousands dollar for people in the western world, an alternative way to do some investing, but lots of people in countries with bad financial systems (lets say Argentina or Venezuela) tried to use crypto as their stable banking system and it failed them miserably and now lost almost everything.

So while in theory crypto offers that alternative that should be better than those shitty countries economic policies, in practice, this gave them something worse than their local bank.

Yes Yes, you can use a hardware wallet and would have avoided all of that, the reality is that a very high percentage of people were just using the tools offered to them and didn't think it was all a giant fraud.

[nightski]

SVB depositors were almost in the same boat. Maybe not this time, but there is no guarantee the government will bail you out. In fact, Janet Yellen (who has a lost any credibility she may have had imho) even said they don't intend to extend that protection to all banks. They prefer to pick & choose who they extend the protection to (especially rich liberal donors).

[jboy55]

Only depositors who had more than 500k deposited. For SVB, a high number for sure, but its not a counterpoint to someone posting how putting trust in crypto bankrupted a large number of people in developing countries when they mistakenly thought they could trust crypto more than a bank.

[nightski]

FDIC insurance is 250k, not 500k. It's not Apples to Apples, but it demonstrates that the banking system is not rock solid either.

Not only that, if you really want to look at exploitation of the poor look no further than our large banks in America.

[dkirill]

Fair. Crypto is not just ftx/investment tho. It’s also a mean to transfer wealth outside of your country. It might be risky but any option is better than none

[JasserInicide]

"Western finance" is heavily regulated (well, consumer banking anyway) and for the most part is pretty secure. Crypto is completely unregulated and chalk full of bad actors distracting you with grandiose promises while fleecing you behind your back. Every other month there's a report of some massive theft/data breach at an exchange.

[int_19h]

Conversely, part of those regulations involves excluding whole countries from the system, most of them for purely political reasons.