>working democracy

That's a sizable assumption to begin with. Democracies are less and less, well, working because the Internet itself has eroded trust significantly and is moving the parameters of epistemology around. That is a problem caused by tech, so how is it not a tech problem ? The work done in the blockchain space on trust is IMO very important.

The blockchain has nothing to say about trust outside of its ledger, which is to say in the physical world. Even if you try and hook it up to physical sensors, the sensors themselves can be compromised just like anything else. Any people who are currently distrusted by other people could just as easily put lies into the blockchain, so it has nothing to say about that kind of trust either. The only thing the blockchain allows you to trust is “X was entered into the blockchain previously”.

Actually, my understanding is that cryptocurrencies are having impact in developing countries. They can address hyperinflation, access to financial services, general friction in exchanging money etc.

Do you have a source for this?

For example, Erdogan flat out banned businesses from accepting cryptocurrency when he saw that people were putting their money in cryptos because of the inflation of the Turkish Lira.

It's not like cryptos are a stable currency, either. Question: Wouldn't it make more sense for people in develping countries to buy more stable assets or currencies, or is it not possible to that because of a lack of access?

One example from last month: https://decrypt.co/69205/cardano-developer-iohk-strikes-part...

One of the most common arguments used against Bitcoin is "it's only good in black markets." That's essentially what OP said. Do black markets not operate when Bitcoin is banned by government? Is this not the essential function cryptocurrency exists to serve? The outcome in Turkey for Bitcoin will be indicative. I have a timeline of 5-6 more years before I count it out.

Venezuela was using Bitcoin a lot when they were experiencing hyper inflation. I just Googled this again for an update and I saw that they may have dropped their former currency altogether?

I think access is a major problem here, although I haven't dug into the issue enough to know for sure.

M-Pesa and SMS banking in general had an immense impact in African nations. Bitcoin - not so much.

yes because it’s so easy to get stable internet access, electricity and, translate fiat to crypto (without an equivalent to coinbase and without a credit card) do you have any idea what’s it’s like to be in a developing country? do you know the literacy rates? do you think crypto things are in their languages? do you see all the exit scams?

these tech people are in such a myopic bubble

But of course hyperinflation will never ever come to the first world

With all due respect, people have been predicting that “$thing will (finally) be what leads to hyperinflation in the US” for decades and decades, but it has never happened. That’s not to say it can’t happen... but that predictions of imminent hyperinflation have historically been a poor bet and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> Actually, my understanding is that cryptocurrencies are having impact in developing countries.

Which country specifically would be a good example of this? If there are in fact any examples of this.

Dollar or any other strong fiat does this role better. Crypto is just not accessible in those countries and the opposite of friction-less.

USD cash can do this too.

More people need to appreciate this

They never transact with people in countries that have strict financial controls, so the problem does not exist for them. I pay people in Venezuela in cryptocurrency because nothing else is a viable option.

There's an assumption that people should think evading currency controls and taxes is somehow heroic. I'm happy that crypto allows people to violate US sanctions, but that's because I'm specifically against US sanctions, not the rule of law.

A lot fewer people use crypto for ill motives than you think.

Paper USD is a lot easier to hide than a Bitcoin transaction on a public ledger

Have you thought about what effect 40% inflation year over year does to you like in Argentina?

Or over 1000% in Venezuela.

Which cryptocurrency do you use for it?

The people who have the capability to use and exchange cryptocurrencies in developing countries are those who already have local or foreign bank accounts denominated in USD or EUR.

These same people then mine coins in those countries, utilising cheap or subsidised electricity, resulting in power shortages.

As we have seen in Turkey, these exchanges can be easily shut down, or the founder can simply disappear with all the cash.

These are not really long term solutions, and the existence of cyrptocoins is probably making the individual lives of people in the 3rd world worse.

I think its more likely that if these grey-market coins didn't exist, the local tech bros in the 2nd/3rd world would actually be pushing Governments to improve general financial regulation and stability, and building a proper series of banking companies themselves.

The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it doesn't have a jurisdiction or location[1]; you can solve some problems in some places via a functioning government, but Bitcoin solves some problems in all places simultaneously.

[1]: this is not to claim, as some do, that it is unregulatable, although it may be.

What problem does Bitcoin solve?

How to get a ransom without being caught?

How to pay a drug/malware/CP dealer?

How to receive a bribe without physical exchange/trail?

Cash doesn’t work well for any of these use ases, while crypto (esp. Monero) is just perfect!

Far as I can tell bitcoin boosters are either people that can't trust people for some reason, like they are doing something grossly illegal. Or they hate having to trust people.

Reasonably private online payments. It's the closest to cash on the internet in terms of privacy.

(HN is a very pro-privacy community, judging from Apple vs. Google discussions, so I take it for granted that a desire for privacy doesn't need further justification or elaboration.)

Not really. Your wallet address needs to be shared with others if you want to transfer money, and anyone that knows your wallet knows all of your transactions. If Google decided to build a crypto wallet into Chrome, I think you can agree it would trivial for them to see all of everyone's transactions.

I agree that BTC has terrible privacy. But this is a BTC problem, not a Bitcoin problem. A smart Bitcoin wallet would not reuse addresses across transactions, and would split your coins into many fragments, making them virtually impossible to trace. But to do this you need low fees and therefore big blocks - what BSV and BCH are doing. Several wallets on BSV already do this today, like HandCash (https://handcash.io), and the user experience is fantastic.

In case anyone reading this is as confused as I was: there is a schism in the cryptocurrency world where two forks of bitcoin, known as BCH and BSV, both still claiming to be bitcoin-but-not-that-other-bitcoin (BTC, the token meant by 99.9% of people who say "bitcoin"), have decided that their pope is the only authentic one.

Close. Bitcoin is a concept for a system - described in a whitepaper and in forum posts, and expressed in an initial release. BTC would prefer you think they alone are Bitcoin, but is the Catholic Church alone Christianity? Certainly not. BTC, BCH, and BSV are all implementations of that idea, each with various degrees of similarity to the original Bitcoin, and each of which share a history back to the genesis block. Interestingly, when you dive in, you'll see that BTC is the one that has diverged the furthest from the project's original goals and protocol, not the so-called "forks" BCH and BSV, which were both created from not wanting to change protocol rules. This is good reading if this viewpoint is new: https://thatsbtcnotbitcoin.com

This is not a battle you can win.

Choose a better one.

That's just a flaw of bitcoin, some other cryptos don't have this problem.

Almost any online transaction today (in the US, at least) involves a credit card or PayPal, either of which divulges your name and maybe location to the merchant. Bitcoin doesn't.

I don't know what to make of your strawman about Google. This thread was asking about problems Bitcoin solves. Bitcoin allows payments without an intermediary automatically divulging your identity to the other party to the transaction. It doesn't also need to end the arms race of consumer privacy in tech in order to be a useful advance for privacy.

Why bother answering if every response will be dismissed with "yeah but that's not a real use case"

The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture. The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation.

Perhaps you don't consider those risks to you to be very big, so you don't place much value on mitigating them. Other people do, however.

> The threat of unwarranted civil asset forfeiture.

That's exactly what I'm saying in my original comment, though. Do you think a government that wants to disown your assets cares if you have an entry in a database that proves that it's yours by law? THEY are the law, fuck your blockchain.

> The threat of arbitrary unbounded inflation.

Again. People who are affected by this usually don't have the means to just log into Coinbase and buy some crypto. Even if, it's not like it's a very stable place to put your money in to.

> Do you think a government that wants to disown your assets cares if you have an entry in a database that proves that it's yours by law? THEY are the law, fuck your blockchain.

If they cannot deprive you of the key, they cannot deprive you of use of the assets.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

If everything is considered ‘owned’ based on NFTs, and other stuff relies on that to verify ownership and provide services, then the government talking the physical land only gives them the utility of the land itself, and not the other stuff (eg. The ability to sell the property) - plus, the government superseding a fictional blockchain-backed real estate market is likely to cause a market crash.

Blockchains and NFTs make sense only when the blockchain becomes the source of truth, and it does solve real problems - it just doesn’t work for cryptocurrency when someone’s $1 could be worth 30 cent or 6 dollars in just a year. Nobody wants that amount of uncertainty.

Claiming you have the ability to sell some property when all you actually have is an NFT that purports to represent ownership of the property, but the property itself is in the hands of a government that doesn’t recognize that NFT is going to have a significant impact on the sale price you can get for that NFT.

Property rights are always going to rest on the rule of law, and in places where the rule of law is strong, property title law is well established and doesn’t need a distributed ledger to disrupt it. Disrupting it would generally be bad.

> "only gives them the utility of the land itself"

"only"?

I'd say the "utility of the land" IS the only value of "having" land.

Obviously you’re missing that most of any land’s value comes from the fact that it can be wrapped as NFT.

It is well known historic fact that Romans fought for new land knowing that the time will come when you could wrap it into NFT to make finally useful!

Same story with Columbus and his ICO (Initial Columbus Odyssey).

I gotta give you credit, "NFTs are important because you can otherwise only have the actual use of the land, not the financially-speculative value of the land" is a bold take given that usually the cryptocurrency pitch (that CCs are a good store of value because they won't inflate relative to real assets) is exactly the opposite.