[sneak]

Cross-border remittances is one. Making donations to organizations that are being actively persecuted/censored by the state is another.

[BoppreH]

Sometimes that's the right thing to do, but none of those examples sound legal.

[sneak]

Donating to Wikileaks is entirely legal. The blockade undertaken by Visa and MC at the behest of the USG was extralegal; there were no charges against anyone at the time.

Even had there been charges, donating would still have been legal.

Furthermore, your criterion was “not better served”; please don’t move the goalposts.

Remittances and cross-border donations are way better served by cryptocurrencies than any other mechanism, full stop. It’s faster, cheaper, and way more reliable than any other method.

[toenail]

Cross border remittances are not legal?

[BoppreH]

Of course it can be legal, but if someone is using cryotocurrencies for this purpose then they're probably skipping some necessary steps.

They could also just really like cryptocurrencies, but that's not a point in favor of the technology.

[sneak]

The only “necessary step” is sending the money. All of the other steps artificially imposed upon cross-border transfers in tradfi are unnecessary.

[toenail]

Maybe they don't like the high fees of the traditional financial system

[BoppreH]

The fees come from fulfilling legal requirements like detection of money laundering and terrorism financing, and also customer security features like fraud detection and multi-factor authentication.

There are fintechs for customers who want lower fees and don't need e.g. physical branches or phone support. That's perfectly fine.

But a fintech that didn't perform KYC would be shut down pretty quickly by the police, so there's a floor on how low fees can be while remaining legal.

[toenail]

Congrats, you went from it's not legal, to it's irrational, to it's more competitive because of government regulation, you've made progress.