Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?

I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.

It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.