[mjburgess]

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.

[eimrine]

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.

[overthrow]

The fun part about such bombastic claims is they can be disproven with just one counterexample.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/us-government-enlists-usdc-f...

> US Government Enlists USDC for ‘Global Foreign Policy Objective’ in Venezuela: Circle CEO

Even the US government is willing to admit there are situations where crypto is the best option available.

[mjburgess]

Indeed -- all that's required is a single example.

> USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar.

Nothing is denominated in USDC, it isnt a currency (indeed, no cryptocurrency is a currency, since none are a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account ).

The USD is the currency here.

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.

[overthrow]

> Venezuela already has extensive digital payment systems

Sure, but those systems had been sabotaged by a politican/dictator named Nicolás Maduro who rejected the results of an election.

> What in this process requires (or even benefits from) blockchain exactly, or cryptocurrency?

A decentralized payments system is one that cannot be shut down by Nicolás Maduro.

Do you think the Venezuelan crisis was just a big conspiracy theory?

[mjburgess]

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.

[overthrow]

> 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.

Spoken like a true first-world armchair warrior. Maduro shut off the non-p2p systems, as dicussed. He then failed to stop crypto payments. Do you think it was his "preference" all along to fail to control the flow of money?

Don't underestimate people's ability to figure out a VPN. It's not hard, and the prospect of literally starving to death can be quite motivating.

And since you mentioned magic, the real magic would be any country stopping its citizens from accessing the internet. Even in North Korea, there are people with unfiltered satellite internet, because Kim Jong Un has not yet built a Faraday cage around the sky.

[peterscbrown]

"...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.

[dS0rrow]

https://github.com/monero-project/research-lab/raw/master/wh...

[csomar]

It's okay. Only you is real.