[arcticbull]

> 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.

[latchkey]

> 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.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=vietnam+woman+gold+teeth

[arcticbull]

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.

[V__]

> you need a distributed ledger for this

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.

[arcticbull]

And in exchange you get wild volatility swings and full financial freedom for criminals. Some things are just bad.

[latchkey]

This is very much a snarky troll comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[arcticbull]

No it isn't. It's a statement of objective reality. That isn't really forbidden under the news guidelines to my knowledge, although I could have expounded as the topic became more divisive so here goes:

The system is specifically designed to permit unchecked criminality. That is a fact. Lack of AML, KYC and any oversight, recourse or control that you would use to reduce malicious actor impact in the space is explicitly, intentionally removed. This allows for unchecked criminality. That's why we have the volume of ransomware we do, because in the past you couldn't send millions of dollars in Starbucks gift cards by FedEx to get your data decrypted.

Given substantially all legal use cases are served better, faster, cheaper, safer and more reliably using classical systems it's no surprise crypto self-selects for criminality.

The volatility is an objective reality. Its easily one of the most volatile assets on the market today.

I'm sure DDT salesmen would agree feel the same way if I said that DDT was 'just bad' despite its obvious and measurable negative effects on the environment, but I can't say I shed a tear when the eagles managed to emerge from their shells with all their limbs.

[latchkey]

> You should just show them wise.com where they can open a US dollar account.

These are women in the north of Vietnam who know nothing about US dollar accounts and don't even speak english.

[arcticbull]

It's localized.

[latchkey]

and?

[csomar]

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".

[zinekeller]

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?

[arcticbull]

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.

[1] https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/what-we-do/consumer-...

[latchkey]

> A couple years ago a single Bitcoin transaction cost $60.

Ah yes let's counter an argument with something that is a couple years old.

This was brief during a time of high usage, which has also been fixed. Today, the average bitcoin transaction cost is a couple dollars.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Let's also not forget that there are a lot more chains now, where the fees are pennies.

[overthrow]

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.

[arcticbull]

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.

And again, not addressed by crypto.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...

[overthrow]

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?

[arcticbull]

The (a) scams and (b) insane volatility.

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.

[latchkey]

Everything of value has volatility, zoom out on that gold chart please.

[arcticbull]

Which is why gold is a bad currency.

And as an asset, gold is priced dramatically over it's industrial value, and it's un-productive. People shouldn't invest in shiny pebbles anymore than they should invest in digital magic beans, IMO.

[overthrow]

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.

[arcticbull]

> 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.

They're not using it, at all. Trading volumes have plummeted, nobody uses it for exchange of value due to the volatility and the fees. You wouldn't say people are 'using Apple' because they're holding Apple stock, and you shouldn't say people are 'using Bitcoin' because they're holding onto it in a portfolio they've probably written off due to massive losses.

> 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.

(a) Lightning is totally unsustainable because it requires you complete an on-chain transaction to open a channel, which would take about 75 years, trillions of dollars and all the remaining block reward to do for everyone on earth. It would even take months to open a channel for everyone in the Bay Area. Then it suffers from quadratic routing complexity, and offers few if any of the guarantees of the underlying chain.

(b) It's not the replacement for $20 check cashing, that's a loan, a cash advance. That's what you're paying for. You can cash checks for free at any online bank.

> 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.

It's literally down 60% from a year ago (almost 70% adjusting for inflation). By any objective or subjective measure that's a "big price to pay" for anyone who purchased last year. So no, it's not.

You yourself called these people out as 'living paycheck to paycheck' so by definition your own users would be utterly rekt using what you're advocating for.

Setting aside the 'crypto' third-rail, what if I came up with a way for anyone without AML or KYC to buy and sell shares of GameStop. Would you then immediately tell me that poor people should use shares of GameStop as money? In Africa? I suspect that would be viewed as overwhelmingly predatory.

[jacquesm]

> The under-banked don't have bank accounts because they don't have money.

They might have some money but they may not have a home address.