[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]

Sigh, your anti-crypto trope needs better analogies. We've been through this many times and you just keep repeating the same tired arguments in an effort to sound knowledgable and spread your one sided and often misguided and outdated opinions.

> It's a statement of objective reality.

No, it isn't. USDT, a crypto currency, is pegged to the dollar and doesn't have consistently huge swings in volatility.

> The system is specifically designed to permit unchecked criminality.

Fiat USD will always be the largest, by orders of magnitude, used currency for criminality, on the planet.

[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?