As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.
Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."
That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?
I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.
And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.
You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine, and _any kind of so-called quasi-cash operations_ including buying cryptocurrencies or transferring money to exchanges. And paying salaries in anything but national currency is of course illegal. So tech-savvy folks could still try to find local who owns crypto and would sell it for cash, but for regular people crypto doesn't offer any respite.
Stablecoins are acquired in less-authoritarian countries and then sent to people in Argentina and other socialist / corrupt countries. They then circulate among the people just like paper dollars do. As this black market grows it is very difficult to shut it down.
Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely the socialists try to adapt to this new world rather than shut down the internet. It will be interesting to see what new theft they come up with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32292222
If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.
If crypto skeptics on HN were right then crypto would have died during one of the prior busts like beanie babies did. But it has an ideology underpinning it (Austrian economics and individual freedom) that keeps it growing.
While there are many who get in for a quick flip there is a large, possibly the majority, who see it as a movement rather than a get quick rich scam. This is why it doesn’t die.
And some people like NFTs just like they enjoy baseball and Pokemon cards - it's for collecting, except they can also be used programmatically in software. NFTs are for entertainment.
I think you are just woefully misinformed and know essentially nothing about what is going on here, but the HN karma is pretty nice.
Do you have evidence for that? While the Argentinian economy is struggling, and the government has defaulted in the past few years, I don’t know of widespread, illegal government theft of private citizens’ assets. The opposite seems true: they want people to get richer in exports, so they get more in taxes.
Is your argument that taxation is theft? They do need taxation in order not to default again.
No, they are not. They are abusing cryptocurrency (the correct term, no matter how often you use 'crypto') to commit tax fraud. Which makes the government even more inefficient as it already is.
Seeing as you’re the CTO of a nft company you clearly have bias.
Here’s an informative episode on a podcast if you actually care https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-standard-p...
> Thomas Semaan is an ex-student of Saifedean who has been active in the Lebanese bitcoin scene. He joins us to tell us about the Lebanese fiat crisis, how bitcoin has helped him and other bitcoiners, and compare its effectiveness to political activism and delusions of reform.
This is the problem. Obviously bitcoin is of use and interest to bitcoiners. What we're trying to understand is if regular, non-bitcoiners are getting value from it on a large scale.
Is crypto in Argentina and Lebanon something that has a real impact on regular people who are not deeply involved in the technology?
This is why I only believe it when a publication like the BBC or the NYT cover it: crypto incentivizes people who hold it to boost it, so it's very hard to trust stories that don't come from news sources with strong conflict of interest policies and a long standing reputation for journalistic integrity.
That podcast is called "The Bitcoin Standard"!
This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
Of course I’m a minority but like all movements crypto is selling something to average people but the grand plan is only understood by a minority. Countries like Argentina have been basket cases for decades despite endless bailouts and IMF shenanigans. It’s time for something new that I believe is a valuable experiment with clear theoretic and ideological underpinnings that couldn’t possibly be worse than the socialist nightmare destroying billions of common people.
I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.
>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.
Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.
The problem is that your alternative has proven to be worse.
But also, lets assume that everyone in Argentinia is going to convert all of their currency into cryptocurrency.
What kind of repercussions is this going to have?
Well, for one, the currency in which people get paid is still the Argentinian one, not a cryptocurrency. Keep that one in mind, because its going to be affected by the rest.
What is going to happen next is massive tax fraud. People are not going to pay taxes over their belongings (you might agree with that as 'libertarian' but its going to hurt the government income for sure). This is going to result in a weaker government, and a weaker coin.
With a weaker government and a weaker coin, people get less value out of their currency. Remember that the people were paid in the national currency? Its worth less now. And also, what is going to happen when the government runs weaker? More crime, less public health, outsourcing to private entities, and defacto you will get something akin to some libertarian paradise where the top on the pyramid can actually survive and have opportunities, while the rest ends up on the bottom of cannon fodder.
With cryptocurrency, there's no such thing as accountability or paying your taxes. Such libertarian dreams are going to have the effect that the government becomes weakened and eventually you get that survival of the fittest in an unhealthy way. Without accountability and without taxes you'll get more corruption, not less. If you want an example of that, just look at Russia.
Meanwhile, all of these people are heavily dependent on? On what you think? Exchanges. Which, as proven by Mt. Gox, are not always going to be pure in their effort. So spare me the independence bullshit.
Centralized banking works, as long as there's accountability. You reach accountability by rule of law, by regulations. Cryptocurrencies try to avoid these, but neglects the reasons these were enacted in the first place. They're a massive step backwards in that regard.
Every country uses cryptography.
> I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.
Why? What if there is not widespread trend and it is only anecdotes? Why should every new technology be "widely adopted or bust" instead of simply being a new interesting tech which a hacker can tinker with just because? Blockchains, NFTs and smart contracts are far more interesting than yet another iteration of a web framework or yet another way to track user data.
I want to see evidence that the benefits of blockchains etc are outweighing the very obvious harms they are causing.
A genuine one I am concerned about is the energy consumption of Proof of Work chains. But the tide is shifting towards Proof of Stake, with Ethereum network achieving 2 significant milestones towards that recently (Ropsten, Sepolia) and a third penultimate one (Goerli) planned in the week of Aug 6th. So the main chain's transition towards Proof of Stake is likely to happen in September and Ethereum's energy consumption drops 99% or even more.
Other purported disadvantages (gambling, sucking in capital and brains etc etc) are totally non-obvious and highly debatable.
Half of the world currencies has done worse than crypto even on small time scales.
(Hint: the fact that people were rioting in the streets to _avoid_ it suggests the answer is not many)
If the value of bitcoin as speculative asset is going to rise, then it is best to not spend it, but to hoard it. If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
If it is a currency then it needs to have a stable value. If the value stabilizes, then no one will want to invest in it. Since it does not have any "real" commodity value it would then death spiral. I don't know how you square this circle.
> If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
When people need something more than bitcoin, they'll trade for it. Food, shelter, medicine, etc. People will certainly trade for these things. But maybe they'll pass on replacing a phone that's only 2 years old or getting an xbox or 6 pack of beer.
It's fascinating to me that people say currency can't be deflationary or people will hoard it. You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money? People act like the economy will stop, but no matter how deflationary a currency is, people will still trade it for needs like food and shelter.
The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.
> When speculative investing involves the purchase of a foreign currency, it is known as currency speculation. In this scenario, an investor buys a currency in an effort to later sell that currency at an appreciated rate, as opposed to an investor who buys a currency in order to pay for an import or to finance a foreign investment.
BTC has been subject to massive swings. Just looking at CoinDesk, it was easy to find a time where it doubled in value in less than a month. Why would any reasonable person spend that sort asset?
I think the dynamics of the market are as important as the technical features that some digital currency has.
With the amount of shady alt coins and defunct btc exchanges separating authentic vs bogus transactions is even tougher for regulators.
I invested in bitcoin five years ago and I an happy.
Ukrainians are heavily invested in crypto and consider crypto (at a governmental level) to be a significant contribution to their efforts in maintaining their sovereignty.
It's tiresome waiting for the unimaginative and uninsightful to open their eyes
- Which countries?
- What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now?
- With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it?
I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who have befitted from the crypto boom. I want more than just anecdotes about individuals: I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.