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by righthand 735 days ago
How does crypto solve any of that if its future is just more regulation pressing it into the molds of already established systems? I can’t pay my moving guy in crypto, I have to convert it to cash and all that “protection” is easily surmountable.
2 comments
throwaway22032 735 days ago
The problem that Bitcoin aimed to solve was that cash cannot be transferred online. The headline of the whitepaper - "a peer to peer electronic cash system".

You can transfer cash in person by handing someone coins or notes. It might be illegal in some jurisdictions to do that for high amounts or certain items, but it is at least physically possible i.e. permissionless.

Bitcoin is that, but online.

The regulations you are describing affect what are essentially financial institutions operating on top of the system.

The act of sending Bitcoin is permissionless by design.

That's it, that's all it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

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righthand 735 days ago
But it’s still trackable and not completely anonymous as has been proven time and again. So while Bitcoin claims that the purpose is so rudimentary, the established systems don’t exactly make it true.
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eterpstra 735 days ago
Different countries have different regulations and differing levels of permeation within society. Nobody in the US will take crypto as payment (other than a few niche retailers), but it's a pretty popular payment option in places like Argentina, Estonia, El Salvador, Vietnam, India, Singapore, and Nigeria. So popular in Nigeria, in fact, that it's displacing the local currency and the government is (unsuccessfully) trying to ban p2p transactions.
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pavlov 735 days ago
I’ve been to Estonia a lot, and have never seen any retail business that would accept crypto.

I’m sure there’s a niche somewhere. But when you say “pretty popular payment option”, it sounds like it’s a rival to Visa and Mastercard, and that prices would be listed in crypto instead of euro. That’s absolutely not true.

Re: Nigeria, anecdotally my few friends from the country tell me that the crypto boom is primarily about local influencers promoting their own coins as investments, not actual payments.

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