What I don't understand about the crypto remittances argument is how the people sending and receiving them are supposed to convert them into spendable currency. My hunch is that a lot of the value of cryptocurrency in those countries comes from the fact that it's been astronomically increasing in value, not that it's a great way to move money around remittance barriers.

Whether this is a good thing or not probably depends on what you think of illegal markets in desperate situations.

Otherwise I don’t know what else to say

This is a general problem I have with crypto stories: every crypto coin has a built in incentive for people who hold it to hype it so it's really hard to tell if actual regular users are finding it useful yet.

The final goal is not to be able to convert crypto to fiat, the goal is to keep everything in crypto. Do you think all this infrastructure is being build just to convert it back to fiat, what cypherpunks want is to destroy fiat.

Inevitably the answer is "some trusted third party" that turns it into a vanilla remittance.

- If you have a bank account you can go through crypto exchanges. Centralized of course. - There are p2p platforms that connect buyers with sellers. So in the platform, similar to Binance p2p, you can see how many transactions other people have and buy/sell crypto from them. - There's a black market which has home-delivery. So you contact them through the internet (you can find links in reddit and other sites, most go through Discord) and they send you a person with your crypto/fiat and make the transaction in your home. You can also go to their location if you prefer.

Not sure if that really answers the question, but if I was receiving remittances from abroad doing options 2 or 3 would be simpler and cheaper than using any traditional finance tools, which all require you to have a bank account in the first place (a LOT of people don't have one here because of the requirements to open one) and have higher fees and bureaucracy.

> "the government, which controlled all official foreign trade, continued to maintain a highly artificial exchange rate with Western currencies. The exchange rate worsened distortions in the economy at all levels, resulting in a growing black market and the development of a shortage economy.[25] The only way for an individual to buy most Western goods was to use Western currencies, notably the U.S. dollar, which in effect became a parallel currency. However, it could not simply be exchanged at the official banks for Polish złotys, since the government exchange rate undervalued the dollar and placed heavy restrictions on the amount that could be exchanged, and so the only practical way to obtain it was from remittances or work outside the country. An entire illegal industry of street-corner money changers emerged as a result. The so-called Cinkciarze gave clients far better than official exchange rate and became wealthy from their opportunism albeit at the risk of punishment, usually diminished by the wide scale bribery of the Militia.[23]"

> "As Western currency came into the country from emigrant families and foreign workers, the government in turn attempted to gather it up by various means, most visibly by establishing a chain of state-run Pewex and Baltona stores in all Polish cities, where goods could only be bought with hard currency."

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/09/business/the-lure-of-a-do...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_People%27s_Republic#Eco...

For all the harsh words you posted without evidence, thankfully you've at least admitted you don't understand much.

Your premise is that cryptocurrency is not "spendable currency" which is simply false. I pay people in hyperinflationary environments in cryptocurrency variants with low transaction costs and fast speed, and they in turn directly spend it on physical goods like food.

Is this such an incredulous thing to believe in a country where the official fiat currency is worthless?

My supermarket gives me an NFT in paper form every-time I buy something.

The current concept of ownership appears to be that if I own something, broadly speaking, that means people generally agree (and the state, and ultimately their monopoly on force, will back up) that I get to say what gets done with it and who gets to make use of it, and that it's not OK for someone else to take it away from me without my consent.

If NFTs are going to change that, I'm not sure I like it.

They only did that in some places where there were poor Taxi markets (medallions etc). In places where you could hail a cab follow it and pay for it with your smartphone years before Uber, they did nothing. They didn't exactly invent that. They just said that because magic fairydust they could do that also in cities where the law said they couldn't. Which is kind of strange when you thinnk about it.

Local Taxi hailing apps were first. Uber adopted this and their disruption of many local markets happened only after offering cheaper alternatives by burning money.

It's a side point to the thread though.