North Vietnam is also where people earn the equivalent of $30 a month and can't afford to HODL until the next price spike, as well as not having many crypto on/off ramps for the unbanked.

Frankly, the enthusiasm some wealthy Westerners have for dumping newly printed gambling tokens on some of the world's poorest people is part of the cause of the anti-crypto backlash the OP describes.

They are already gambling on gold.

Sure, but for all its flaws, gold is a 5000 year old store of wealth with some use in dentistry that doesnt lose most of its value on a regular basis, not a pump and dump scheme whose wealthy foreign speculators need bagholders who havent bored of hearing about its future as global currency to bail out their artificial asset's latest collapse.

"Sure but". Look at the last 100 years of the value of gold. The value has gone all over the place, with many crashes. It isn't as stable as you think.

All it takes is one single "discovery" of a massive cache of gold. That cache is then controlled by the government who's land it is found on. It is one of the most heavily manipulated forms of 'money' on the planet.

It might be good enough for you, but as the person who started this thread, I'm clearly in the camp of less government control over my funds... No, thanks.

Excuse me. When did I say gold was good? I said it wasn't as abominably bad as cryptocurrency, which doesn't need something as unlikely as a discovery of a massive cache of gold to wipe out poor people's meagre fortunes and is the most heavily manipulated form of money on the planet.

It's like concluding that as poor Vietnamese people already smoke (the men generally do...) in lieu of better forms of entertainment, what would really improve their lives is some crystal meth.

100% true. Awful elitism.

Being in Vietnam i can attest the gap, and the gap also exists within the country. It isn't unusual to see customers at Starbucks opening their wallet to show they filled all the debit card pockets in full.

The population has an instinctive distrust for centralised authorities for the most part. Although very patriotic, they wouldn't place their life's worth of wealth in any of the several government controlled banks. Nor to the more independent or even foreign banks either. And it's good that way, Vietnam has a thriving crypto scene and may very well be one of top adopters of crypto. For what business use case they don't know quite yet, but it will come.

Same is true for Bangladesh, India, Philippines, etc. They all have good Internet connectivity but too many unbanked people.

Mobile wallets are quite popular for the unbanked in those countries. You don’t need a decentralised ledger for that.

The banks are awful and have been known to go out of business and take peoples money with them. The concept of FDIC insurance doesn’t exist. Also, good luck getting an account when you don’t have an address.

Your reasoning is something like: problem unbanked people, solution crypto. I don't understand that reasoning at all. Why not look at solutions that have actually proven to work first? Why not investigate the problem and figure out what their needs actually are?

> Why not look at solutions that have actually proven to work first?

Power structures are ending cash in various places for various reasons, and we need some even kind of private digital replacement to cash.

> the Vietnam govt's version of FDIC is like $2k.

So, like 8 years salary? That's significantly better than in the USA, I don't think it's making the point that you think it is.

Do the phones get stolen?

They do, but such event is rather considered the victim's fault for being a careless idiot. Stealing a phone isn't more an act of selfish robbery than a merciless lesson for those who don't keep valuable items safe. Better the phone than the house!