Yes, it's different, because for a drug lord not being able to access some amount of dirty cash is very inconvenient, while for the average person on the flag of a regime, it may be an end

"There are a few people in the world who get locked out from banking by an oppressive regime" is just another rather unconvincing argument for crypto. Yes, let's upend the world's financial system, evolving and improving for centuries, for THAT.

Next it will be "but crypto will let you monetize your private data". Yeah no, it won't.

You can get locked out of your bank account due to institutional incompetence (happened to a friend of mine in Spain) or due to being on the wrong side of a political argument (e.g. donating to the protesting truckers in Canada).

I think there's a lot of value in being slightly harder to oppress by the political classes or arse-covering and uncaring bank managers.

And the solution is? Have a system where I can lose ALL my money by forgetting a password? Or when a crypto exchange goes boom and my life's savings are not FDIC ensured? I am sure your friend could get back in into the bank account. Being a random subject to a dumb banking accident is not the reason to upend the financial lives of billions.

It's not a binary decision though.

You can have some money in cash, some amount in real estate, gold, crypto...

Depends on how much you have etc. But it's not a "everything has to be crypto" or nothing may.

If you can loose all your live savings by forgetting one password or one company going down, you made some terrible decision when it came to diversification of investments

The world in which the majority of citizens is financially literate does not exist, and "crypto" is not going to magically fix it. This libertarian free-for-all paradise will result in scores of ruined citizens, who then will have to be taken care of by society anyway. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

Then exercise some personal responsibility and caution. Keep your passwords carefully and don't trust certain crypto insitutions. The crypto world is indeed loaded with cases of fraud, but underneath that, here is a system of systems that lets people who do indeed get locked out of conventional financial systems send and receive funds without the permission of a central regulatory authority or some dysfunctional, corrupt political control mechanism, It doesn't always work at that, but it offers one strong further alternative. Also, how is it upending the lives of billions of people? The two things you compare at the end are not directly related and definitely not in a causative way. Wanting a further means of avoiding being a victim of dumb banking accidents doesn't make you culpable in whatever defects crypto has.

It's not just the rampantly emotional and repetivie crypto hate on HN that's absurd, it's also the sheer narrow follishness of so many of the arguments that's rather galling.

It's okay that it's unconvincing to you, but I think about dissidents and other "malicious" actors.

Apart from that, with a decentralised system it's way more complicated for others (!) to fuck up and lock your bank accounts.

But to be frank: I found the idea intriguing, never was invested at all. I am also not greedy and apart from taxes for my house I could sustain myself for a couple of months, maybe even 1-2 years without access to my bank accounts

> Watching from the sidelines, the Crypto world seems to just be morphing into the normal financial world.

Say this is true, how amazing would that be for countries without existing banking infrastructure to easily access it?

this is already being done via mobile phones. Crypto doesn't solve the problem of being unbanked. In fact, the requirement that you need good internet speed for crypto to run locally means it's even harder for a place without infrastructure to participate.

In India, everyone has a phone even if they do not have a roof, bank account, proper 3 meals a day, etc. Bank accounts also require minimum balance, address and identity proof which is hard to get for some, local branch is necessary to open an account due to regulation and quality can vary wildly even for urban centres.

> In fact, the requirement that you need good internet speed for crypto to run locally means it's even harder for a place without infrastructure to participate.

Internet costs less than $2 for monthly unlimited data.

You can find 300-500 Mbps broadband in small towns of country where you won't find roads or basic hospitals.

This. So many people who dislike crypto also assume the world looks like the US - access to banking, trust in their government, trust in their central bank, access to international finance… If the entire world looked identical to the US then I can understand it’s not as useful. If the entire world ran on regional versions of M-Pesa…

Can't they already use WeChat and AliPay?

How do you do that without a bank account?

Can you name a single country that doesn't have a "banking infrastructure", other than perhaps North Korea?

How about all the communities that use mobile credit over SMS for finance?

So the countries would have access to stable internet (can't have crypto without it).

This access is fast and cheap enough for unbanked people to access it.

These unbanked people would also have access to things like smartphones and computers because crypto doesn't exist in real world.

And yet those countries would not have banking infrastructure.

Nice. Nice.

Any such countries exist?

You can actually interact with some crypto projects over SMS, and at the moment there are countries where the majority of txs are SMS mobile credit swaps. The issue is these don’t offer things like account histories, you can’t access financial products like loans (i.e micro loans) and remittance payments are hard to do from abroad in this way.

But actually smart phones and internet access is surprisingly high in sub Saharan africa where they primarily still use SMS trading.

And yes, crypto is starting to catch on out there as an alternative.

> You can actually interact with some crypto projects over SMS

Keyword: some.

Also, banking over SMS was a thing long before crypto.

> But actually smart phones and internet access is surprisingly high in sub Saharan africa where they primarily still use SMS trading.

Then it will be swallowed by something smilar to AliPay. Not by crypto.

How do you sign up to AliPay?

Quote, emphasis mine: "Something similar to AliPay"

Crypto adoption is rising pretty fast in these places. I know you dislike that, but it’s a fact - the tech does work for those usecases. SMS is factually less useful than crypto, there are cash onramps available in the most obscure places, and it helps remittance payments that something similar to AliPay doesn’t. Almost any company that comes into this space has to follow KYC which is basically impossible for the cash societies without these necessary docs. If you look into this, such as the Gates Foundations research on payments and remittance in bankless societies, you’d see that crypto is a great solution. There’s a whole world out there in the crypto sphere outside of shitty NFTs and scams :)

> SMS is factually less useful than crypto, there are cash onramps available in the most obscure places

SMS is less useful than a lot of things. It doesn't mean that crypto is the solution, or that it won't get replaced by something more useful.

As for "cash on-ramps", it just shows that there's nothing inherently useful in crypto that can't be solved by other means. These are centralised points that people explicitly trust to handle their money. It's nothing new, and once societies stabilise they inevitably re-discover/re-implement all the rules and regulations you're so dismissive of (such as KYC rules).

> If you look into this, such as the Gates Foundations research on payments and remittance in bankless societies, you’d see that crypto

Let's see what Bill Gates himself says about crypto: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ut7yj0/im_bill_gates_...