[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.

[mjburgess]

> He then failed to stop crypto payments

lol..err, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(token) -- the government has not tried to "stop" anything.

If any of these systems had any actual utility many states would spend the relatively trivial amounts of money to 51% attack them: https://www.crypto51.app/. Or force take over their miners. Or monpolise half the stake. Or control the (local) mining networks. Or one of a number of trivial actions.

These systems do not work. Their alleged properties are lies. They are not immutable, they are not decentralised, and they are not capable of supporting non-trivial economic transactions.

This is a scam. These stories are lies. They are told by people who are in on the scam. This is a manipulated market, these are manipulated ideas, this entire system is comprised of about 100,000 people around the world, 5% of whom benefit from it.

It is incapable of supporting millions of users, let alone how severely impoverished they'd be at the expensive of the present holders -- thank god such systems cannot scale.

Present holders, no doubt like you, desperate to bring cash into the system, more people in, so your present holdings can increase in value.

I find this reprehensible

[overthrow]

Petro is an attempt at embrace-extend-extinguish. If that "Reception" section is to be believed, nobody is using it willingly. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Look under "NiceHash-able", if the number is less than 100% it means (to an approximation) not enough idle hardware exists on the planet to perform an attack. This means any attack must start with a manufacturing project that must stay secret for a decade+, then outpace growth and eventually surpass the capacity of the private sector. And then you need the energy to actually run the chips - no country would ever consider diverting that much energy away from their population.

If it were possible to compromise a $xxx billion dollar system, with only $x million, don't you think it would have been done by now? Maybe even by some bored billionaire just for fun?

And trust me, I don't think posting in a dead HN thread will speed up or slow down crypto's success in any way, lmao. I just enjoy the banter.

[mjburgess]

States can afford billions. A 5bn attack is cheap.

Also, all these "market cap" numbers are made up. These are heavily manipulated markets. There are about 100k users, and almost no buyers -- this stuff is trivial to bring down.

It's a scam.