There's none.

It's mind boggling that 12 years later, people like the parent poster are still claiming bullshit like that when there's literally zero evidence, rather the opposite. No country with underdeveloped banking and payment systems is interested in something like Bitcoin. They need something cheap and efficient, federated and... centralized! Many African countries are perfectly fine using M-Pesa.

There are a lot of countries where people need anything but centralised money. Because they have every reason not to trust the ones who would run the central authority.

It's hard for some first-world country citizens to imagine that.

Political problems don't have technological solutions.

Telling these people to use Bitcoin is just giving their government another tool to send them to jail.

Any arguments against bitcoin are shattered by one simple fact: currently bitcoin is the least risky and simultaneously the easiest way for russian citizens to fund anti-Putin opposition. Any first world do-gooder who wants to ban it because 'it is bad for environment' should first ban himself from existence because humans are bad for environment.

Seeing how well the ransomware industry is faring, it seems Putin doesn't feel too threatened yet.

But what happens when he bans all exchanges that off-board cryptocurrencies to Ruble? Will the opposition be happy with tokens that are suddenly useless for day-to-day expenses?

The exchange I'm using is already banned. Didn't stop anyone.

The real threat is police baiting users of such exchanges into sending or receiving funds. But we're yet to see such activity from them.

You haven't seen such activity yet because they don't think you're worth the trouble. If you ever are, it will change, and the exchange will become useless.

Nigerians beg to differ: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

I'm a crypto hater as much as one can be, but there are many countries in Asia and S.America where locals may not want to stick to local currency due to sky high inflation, and getting foreign currency is not easy or illegal, and/or making international transfer is not possible or expensive.

Which is a political problem and has nothing to do with their banking systems. These people don't want to use Bitcoin, like they didn't want to use USD or EUR before.

And using Bitcoin as a workaround against authoritarian governments sounds pretty risky to me. Everything leaves a trace on the blockchain and it's fairly easy to control (and ban) conversion to/from fiat currency. Going back to peer-to-peer barter is something, I guess, but I don't think we should celebrate that.

> literally zero evidence

to think like this is mind boggling, try to relax, do some research (no, not reading news or opinion articles), and you will find your evidence

also: if smarter people than you are mostly pro-something, perhaps there is something else to it, stop thinking like a 5 year old trying to save the world from some made up monster no one else can see

The fact that people trade in it isn't enough evidence?

The best evidence is the price surely.