[anon-3988]

Minus using it in countries that have shitty government, no one has provided a use case for it.

And no, just because it is useful for some people in some shitty country doesn't make it generally useful. If carrying knifes and guns to a bank is considered normal in some shithole it doesn't mean that the rest of the world need to adopt this insane idea.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit if many companies are using crypto as a simple and unregulated way to suck money from unsophisticated traders. I wonder how many people lost money on crypto, and where most of the wins are at.

I am also curious how much portion of crypto is actually used for "goods" out in the wild versus simply used for trading. Simple metrics like volume on all exchanges / volume outside of exchanges should suffice.

[anonzzzies]

It is abused a lot, but for instance, for us, an honest b2b saas company, we get flagged like common criminals way too often when paying people who work for us in ‘shitty countries’. It’s always unblocked but it’s a huge strain with sending in paperwork, talking to idiots etc. Our main account has been blocked for 3 weeks and our account manager keeps apologising as the regulatory department is handling it and they don’t really talk to eachother.

I understand the criminal abuse, but it is just an easy way of paying out like you say to countries that banks flag (not sanctioned ones; just one that ‘normal people don’t send money to’).

[roenxi]

International money transfers? I've been scalped by moneychangers before. Next time I need to pass money to a friend overseas I'd prefer to use crypto.

There are a lot of weird peculiarities of the international monetary system (things like the weird not-capital-controls that US citizens operate under where nobody will give them a bank account or whatever) that crypto just bulldozes through and I don't have to worry about when sending someone in a foreign country money.

[martin8412]

Many banks won't give accounts to US citizens because that means giving the US government access. US citizens are subject to worldwide taxation regardless of residence.

Much easier just not to have US customers.

[saikia81]

Toxic description, and demeening to countries outside your own. Do you really have to talk like that about other people that live further away from you?

[anon-3988]

What? I live in one of these countries (not as bad as the one I described). My hometown is very serene and peaceful, until you are of a certain race or creed, then they are extremely racist. It is ultimately a backward place with backward people. Western folks like to pretend that every place is equally good until they have to raise their daughter in one of these places.

The first step to a country's growth is the acceptance of one's place in the world. Pretty much all of the emerging countries of today at some point kinda accepted the state that they are in and decided to get out of it (Japan, China, Indonesia today)

Mind you, I classify certain states in the US as shitholes. The fact that you _need_ a gun means that it is ultimately a shithole place in my book.

[pennaMan]

So just because it helps some people with hard lives survive, you still hate it because some shitty traders talk too much about it?

[anon-3988]

Yes, I don't condone crypto the same way I don't condone carrying guns to a bank (because you can't trust anyone), or building nuclear shelters on the off chance of a nuclear fallout, or building EM bombs in the escalating nature of warring nations in deadlock.

Whether you like it or not, things have external cost to them. "Let's spend a trillion dollar building a bunker for every citizen in the event that a nuclear fallout do happen". "Let's give everyone AC because its getting hot...and will keep getting hotter because we keep installing ACs". All of these things are "good" but people very rarely talk about their externalities.

There's a thing called "opportunity cost", "externalities" that no crypto bros ever brought up when discussing how bad their system compared to the current system.

Should we sacrifice the relatively very efficient global financial with one that can barely handle a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its precursor? What about user protection? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is perfectly possible to lose all of your coins due to fraud and there would be no way to recover it back. How is this even a reasonable financial system?