I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.
Sorry, but can we just stop repeating the wildly unevidenced claims of the gullible and frauds?
Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions?
There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors.
I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. They all make these insane claims in passing. NONE provide any evidence, any argument, anything at all.
None provide an analysis of the current systems in question, the various alternatives, and so on -- none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem.
This is a profoundly manipulated market: all the numbers are fake, all the ideas are fake, all the people are fake.
I downvoted because you are telling too loud worlds: you claim to read all the books, investigated all its authors, realized all of them has some crooked interest and especially because you fail to see any problem solved. You are such a liar.
So the mechanism here is that people in Venezuela have a route to obtaining USD without having to use the banking system because they can sell their USDC electronically.
What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?
Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems, and there's lots of ways of getting money directly to people today. This USDC project was just a lobbied-for newspaper story.
The story above, as all of them, is a result of intense lobbying by shysters who use these throwaway-projects to pump the value of their assets. Stories like this come out all the time, usually within 5 years there's an embarrassing write up of all those involved.
I have no doubt a huge amount of money was wasted using the UDSC "option", enriching many of those involved. Articles like the above do not tell you about the alternatives, they're written to hype crypto.
This is what i mean about the "ideas market" in crypto being as fake as the prices market: it's all manipulated. All these stories are written and released by people profoundly invested in lying to you.
I think if people have working mobile phones then they're able to be sent electronic cash without a p2p system. Indeed, more easily than having a VPN and relevant skills to received crypto assets.
The state here owns the network, rendering all the premises of peer-to-peer systems invalid and thus all of their guarantees.
If the government there wanted to prevent receipt of USDC it well could, as much as it can completely cutoff the country from arbitary parts of the internet.
Indeed, it would seem much more inclined to do that than cut off the mobile network.
The reason it hasnt done so is preference, not that peer-to-peer systems are magic.
"...none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem."
The price of Bitcoin in 2013 was $200. Today it's $29,000. Wouldn't you say that, at a minimum, it's doing a good job of storing value in an inflationary environment? At best it is creating some spectacular wealth which is real.
Bitcoin, specifically, is improving society in many ways, especially in Nigeria, Argentina, the Congo, etc. Even in the West, where our money is more stable and the benefits of it are less obvious, Bitcoin mining offers great benefits to energy grids.
Bitcoin mining benefiting the energy grid is an absurd statement. I live in Texas and the bitcoin mines are messing up our grid by making energy more expensive during heatwaves and freezes and when shutdown we have to pay them!
Bitcoin miners don't compete for the same energy as residential and most industrial uses. Mining isn't profitable unless energy is a fraction of the price that typical consumers pay. The effect is that Bitcoin miners act as energy buyers of last resort. In other words, they buy wasted energy.
Having a buyer of last resort is good for energy grids (or any product), not bad for them. It incentivizes grid build out. Instead of worrying about whether a particular energy development will have enough demand, they can work out a deal with Bitcoin miners to sell wasted energy to them.
Industrial users of power frequently work out power agreements that will pay them in the event that they are required to shut down. This is completely normal. The difference is that Bitcoin miners are EVEN MORE flexible in that they can shut down at a moment's notice, unlike manufacturing or smelting. Again, this is good for grids, not bad.
Let me get this right, your argument is that miners are better than manufacturing or smelting? So that's how mining is beneficial to the energy grid. You bitcoin clowns are really on something.
Did you read a single article. Bitcoin miners ARE raising prices for Texas citizens.
I gave up caring about bitcoin around 2014 after growing out of libertarian brain rot. And sold my last 5btc in 2021 after the superbowl commercial gave me the feeling the jig was up and the last suckers were in. The sooner you come to this realization the soon you can dedicate your time better uses. Good luck.
Your articles don't say anything about raising electricity prices for consumers, except to speculate about it. At least the NYT piece recently on Bitcoin mining cited a study saying there was a 5% increase in electricity bills because of Bitcoin mining, even if it was using secret data.
Again, I would point out (not for you since your reasoning is clearly motivated, but for anyone else reading it) that Bitcoin miners overwhelmingly use electricity that would go to no other use, and thus is incredibly cheap, and would naturally be expected to have little to no effect on average electricity bills.
Most Bitcoin energy contracts in Texas are structured as long-term pre-purchase agreements.
They incentivize the build out of green energy projects such as wind and solar. Projects that in many cases would never have happened without subsidies from Bitcoin miners.
When you say we have to pay them to shut down what you are really saying is that we have to pay them back for energy they already purchased.
The fact that this excess energy is available on demand to utilities ensures we have a more stable energy grid by serving as an energy storage system that we only pay for in times of severe demand.
> I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked.
The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money. Nobody with money has trouble accessing a bank account. There's tons of online-only bank accounts you can open, often with no fees and zero or limited minimum balance requirements. Ally or Schwab in the US. Internationally, there's Wise, and all sorts of regional options like M-Pesa in a number of African countries. Historically we've had postal banking.
The problem is a social one, for congress to solve.
It's akin to saying people are hungry because they don't have grocery bags. The issue isn't the lack of bag, it's lack of food to put into it.
> The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money.
I spent 4 years in Vietnam before getting locked out due to covid. The last two were on a motorcycle traveling all over the country.
Women in the north have money. They store that wealth in gold. In order to keep it secure, they keep it in their teeth. [0]
These same women also have smart phones and really good and inexpensive 4g (probably 5g now) networking, because the government provides the telcom as a function of the military. Coverage is almost 100%, even in the most remote areas.
Those are the underbanked. They need security and they need a way to capitalize on their holdings (think collateralized Kiva loans). Crypto, today, provides that. I know it is true, because I'm doing it myself.
It is 2023, let's bring people out of the dark ages.
You should just show them wise.com where they can open a US dollar account. Wise today provides that too. The idea that you need a distributed ledger for this is straight up false and this is just trying to dredge up problems to solve for a technology that has not found any meaningful use case despite 15 years of flailing.
You don't need it. That doesn't mean it doesn't work as a solution. Not everyone can open a wise account. KYC makes it difficult for people without proper documents.
One can accept that most of crypto is bad, and still see that some people have some use for it (for now). Like, nuance is a thing.
This is a comment that says "I have no idea about the struggle of 4Bn+ people around the world when it comes to payments and banking, so I am just going to dismiss all these people as non-existent and argue that everything is fine here in the West".
This shows that contrary to your own assertion you are the one that actually don't know what you're talking about.
Technology-wise, most countries have faster methods of sending money than how US system works: FedNow is a very late welcome addition that analogous systems already exist in other countries for years, even in places where you don't expect (Nigeria, Myanmar and India of all places do have near real-time transactions). It's genuinely embarrassing that when FedNow was initially announced, most financial analysts and bankers have simply exclaimed "finally!" because that's how behind US is.
Society-wise, most people who are having monetary problems also have much more pressing life-or-death problems: there are danger where they are living (either due to conflicts or due to the general inhospitality of the place), they don't have access to clean water and food, they don't have decent work despite their best efforts, and they don't have a place to study and improve their skills. It doesn't help that their government tends to block improvements that will go to their citizens and just plunder their countries' resources. What problems does cryptocurrency solve here?
Ah yes my favorite counter-argument: check your privilege.
The GDP per capita of Burundi is $221. A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60. The thermodynamics of these kinds of systems make them dramatically more expensive than classical finance because you have to replicate the data so many times. The only reason a Bitcoin payment doesn't cost significantly more than that is nobody's using it, lol.
It's slow, it's inefficient, and worse yet, there's no authority to help try and stabilize the currency. The worst off are hurt the most by wild volatility swings, and crypto is volatility incarnate. The promise that volatility would decrease as a function of market cap simply did not materialize.
Enough with the silly privilege arguments, let's stick to facts.
I specifically called out M-PESA because it's a regional solution to an actual problem they have. [1] And not a blockchain in sight.
Under-banked does not mean they have no money. They obviously have some money or they would starve. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck and give 3% of their wages to a check cashing service. If it were as easy as you seem to think for them to get a bank account, those check cashing businesses all around the country would not exist.
Indeed the problem is they don't have enough money. Regardless this is a problem for congress. If we're sure they have enough money, this has historically been solved with postal banking. Let's just re-start that. [1]
Check cashing isn't just about cashing the check, it's a predatory short-term lending facility. Actually cashing a check is a solved problem.
You're right, this is a job for the government... but the government isn't solving the problem. "Let's just" have the government do their job. Call me when that happens.
While we sit around waiting, the private sector stepped in with a (interim?) solution. What's wrong with that?
The folks you are alluding to who fall into this category are the least sophisticated and most desperate. This makes them easy marks. They shouldn't be buying into unregistered securities to resolve their banking problems. That's how we got the Great Depression and why we not have an SEC.
Further, these folks are disproportionately affected by the insane volatility and high fees of the crypto space.
These so-called financial products are just proxies for US dollar liquidity in the global financial system. If we had to write a prospectus I don't know anyone who isn't a money manager who could figure out how to actually deploy this sensibly. Let alone a homeless person without an address. How are they to 'do their own research'?
Something that makes the problem worse isn't a substitute for a proper solution.
In the US you generally need an account at an AML/KYC exchange to buy crypto for dollars and a bank account, so already we're off to a bad start. Or you can use a bitcoin ATM, which costs like 20%, dramatically worse than predatory lenders.
Maybe instead of saying what people should and shouldn't be doing, you should ask yourself why they're using it anyway despite the obvious downsides.
Lightning fees are less than $0.01 - much better than the alternative of $20 for cashing a check. And the volatility is a small price to pay for financial control, for someone who (with good reason) doesn't trust banks or the government that's failing them.
Actually the easiest way the government could kill crypto would be to get rid of the corruption and help those "undesirables" with their problems, instead of making them fend for themselves. I'm not holding my breath, but in a way I hope that happens.
Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions?
There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors.
I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. They all make these insane claims in passing. NONE provide any evidence, any argument, anything at all.
None provide an analysis of the current systems in question, the various alternatives, and so on -- none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem.
This is a profoundly manipulated market: all the numbers are fake, all the ideas are fake, all the people are fake.