[yaybitcoin]

Argentina may have serious monetary problems, but does the USD? Do we really need financial innovation to move at the "pace of programmers?" Is "bitcoin" really money when you can't use it to buy anything without converting it to money first?

[eterpstra]

No. If you're happy with USD, then use USD. If you are Argentinian (or Venezuelan, or Iraqi, or Zimbabwean) and your currency is getting devalued to nothing and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option.

The attitude I see a lot (mostly by Americans and Western Europeans) is that "Crypto is not useful to me, therefor it is not useful to anyone" - forgetting that it's a global network open to everyone and anyone. And that other countries exist that are difficult places to live at times.

[raincole]

> by Americans and Western Europeans

Exactly this. People in these countries really don't know the problems from the rest of the world.

When an international fintech player get into market (TransferWise, PayPal, etc) they always optimize the experience for users from the US and western EU first. I doubt many people know you can't send money to Ukraine via Paypal unless you mark the transaction as "for Friends or Family", which means you lose all the customer protection. Paypal is worse than crypto in almost every aspect in this case.

[realusername]

> and the government is restricting access to your funds and preventing you from holding USD, then Bitcoin or Stablecoins are a pretty good option.

If your government is going as far to prevent you to own USD, they aren't going to view cryptocurrencies any more favorably anyways.

[psychoslave]

That supposes a government that is not akin to shut down electricity grid arbitrarily and randomly kill people owning material to make computers work out of the grid.

Circumventing policies of a government deemed defective can help on the short terms and narrow perspective, but it won’t fix the fundamental issue.

Currency, be it banker’s bill, digital crytowhatever, are just a marginal side apparatus here.

I’m not an Economist, and I have no idea of what Fernando de la Rua had as insight of outcomes for his decisions. What should have the government tried to stop a precipitating bank run? Would a world where everywhere would follow maraoz economical wishes be a better necessarily a better one?

[ric2b]

The article talks about one such example, Argentina, and how it was harder to own USD than Bitcoin there.

[eterpstra]

Exactly, but the value proposition of crypto is that it's *very* difficult to disrupt. See Nigeria for a current example of a national government trying and failing to get its population to give up on crypto.

[the_snooze]

It's only difficult to disrupt if the people involved stay entirely in the crypto ecosystem. The moment they want to interact with the real world, they open themselves up to the hard power of the state. The US govenrment has been very successful in disrupting crypto offramps; they don't need to break crypto math when they can just put the squeeze on people wanting to trade it for something else.

[realusername]

It's even easier to disrupt than dollars, at least exchanging dollars as cash is popular whereas cryptocurrencies rely predominantly on exchanges and bank transfers.

[ric2b]

If you can exchange cash you can just exchange crypto at the same time as well.

Instead of dollar bills for peso bills you exchange a crypto transaction for peso bills.

[roenxi]

> Argentina may have serious monetary problems, but does the USD?

It is a possibility. The US's debt payments are a similar order of magnitude to their military spending and there is not really a scenario where the principle will get paid back in real terms. And the US's net international investment position is eyewatering. It isn't obvious that the money was well spent in the negative interest rate years, although maybe there has been a lot of capital formation in the US that flew under my radar it is early days yet of positive interest rates.

We're also probing at a big war and there are real questions over what the US will do to USD holdings in the event that risk materialises. We all see what is happening to Russia's assets.

It isn't particularly obvious that the USD is a safer currency in the abstract than the Argentine Peso. Certainly as a foreigner it looks a bit risky. It might also become unreliable for internal use, the debt situation or a political blow up are both ways it could go bad. The situation is something of a spectacle.

[bgroat]

Not only is it nearly impossible to use anywhere... but a huge component of BTC's mythology is making fun of someone who ACTUALLY spent it as money (Bitcoin Pizza)

[ric2b]

It is celebrated, not made fun of.