I disagree. Crypto was the sort of thing you might hear about from a cabbie or at the barber shop. It was definitely something for the normal person on the street.

In fact, that was used as a common sell signal with people quoting the "When your shoeshine boy gives you stock tips" stuff.

I just wanted to add perspective that for these cabbies and normal people it was gambling.

It was not “get free from the government” it was not about convenience of digital payments or whatever crypto promise was there.

For normal people it was get rich quick scheme and that is why advertising was so annoying.

I agree with parent comment - in the end it never really mattered for normal people.

Though for many normal people it was also about buying drugs online which could be seen as "get free from the government" kind of thing

There are orders of magnitude more crypto gamblers than people buying drugs online.

If you buy drugs for which you need to hide from your democratic government, then you are not normal people: you are a criminal.

Good riddance!

It was gambling for everyone. Investors just had more to lose, more options to help hedge, and, in theory, more financial knowledge.

It's not a commodity, and it's utility as a currency was debatable.

Back in the late 1990's I had a laptop and was working in a cafe and the barista asked me if I worked in tech - I said I did - and then proceeded to excitedly go on about how Transmeta was going to dominate the x86 market. Yes, a barista (not knocking baristas but they are not known for their deep vertical knowledge in subjects outside of coffee, except maybe english lit). This was the level of enthusiasm at the time for one of the first techno disrupters. It very much reminds me of crypto a few years ago spinning off a cloud of so many a non techie person with a deep-seated, poorly-informed opinion backed up by a Robin Hood account full of DOGE.

>Crypto was the sort of thing you might hear about from a cabbie or at the barber shop.

Usually what you'd hear was "I don't get it."

Great take. I never see this type of anti-crypto sentiment on HN. What does it feel like to be a contrarian?

Did you ever wonder why HN has so few vaccine contrarians but it has a lot of cryptocurrency contrarians?

Smart people are generally[1] better at seeing through scams and dishonest deals.

[1] Not always, of course, and hype can infect everyone, for a while at least.

Really? HN is one of the most anti-vax and COVID conspiratorial sites I browse regularly, it's pretty right-wing.

It never mattered if you live in a country with a stable currency and access to modern financial services. If that is you, you are in a very small minority of the world population. For the rest of the world, there seems to be some value...

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

People keep harping about that.

Let's say I'm some sort of Ion Trașcă from Moldova.

My country's in shambles, I need to buy and pay for stuff using crypto.

How can I do that? Are there simple to use apps to set things up from the start and then use crypto? UI/fully visual, I don't want to touch ANY scary command line. How do I or who manages my keys?

I'm not sure if you are being intentionally condescending but you are coming across that way. I am going to assume good intention here.

I am not that familiar with the 'end use ' of paying for stuff directly, maybe you can't in Moldova.

Even if you can't pay for things directly, there are plenty of relevant uses. Simply using USDC can be a great store of value for people if their currency is collapsing. See lebanon, turkey, egypt, sri lanka etc.

Then if things get really bad, having some crypto could be very useful again if/when you have to flee the country. There are so many stories of Russians and Ukranians that left and were not able to take any of their currency. Here is just one example: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

Pointing out these real use cases is not 'harping on', in some cases this tech has saved people from terrible situations.

Every bad thing has positive aspects just as every good thing also has negative ones.

For now I'm against cryptocurrencies because every plus I've seen is outweighed by the con (pun intended).

And this is actually the second time in a cryptocurrency topic that I ask this and nobody answers.

Let's say I'm in Extremistan or Extremistia. How do I use cryptocurrency? Is it just a store of value? Can I use it for payments?

I want a guide, I'm new to this. How do I use it?

You'd need to find people/businesses who are willing to accept crypto in exchange for goods or services, and if that is not an option, you'd need to exchange crypto for local (or another accepted) currency.

If your government tries to stop you from doing that, it is of course much harder, but not impossible, since decentralized exchanges such as Bisq would be an option, as well a LocalMonero or regular old black markets, assuming that you have coins that someone is willing to pay for.

Use euros

>> you are in a very small minority of the world population

Really? So EU, UK, USA, China, Australia, with stable currencies, are a small minority..?

Sorry but countries with wild instability are the minority and frankly gold would seem to be a better store of value if that's anyone's concern. Crypto remains speculation i.e. a gamble not a store of value.

After 2022, you still think that these countries (EU, UK, etc.) have a stabile currency? Well, that's some serious positive thinking. I'm still curious to see how people will react when we get a real crash within the next few years.

If the major currencies fail/drop 50%+ per year in N years, crypto value will be screwed too, even more.

Because all those major currencies are backed by huge economies and militaries and whatever's needed to prevent those people from starving.

As usual, it's great to have diversified assets, but that's not really a viable option for the average person that can barely pay their rent.

The worst inflation the UK and EU saw in decades saw their currencies lose 10% of their purchasing power in a year due to an energy price spike caused by a war (and the unwillingness of the central bank to take drastic action to counter it).

Also over the course of 2022, BTC lost more than half its purchasing power, meaning that anybody in the UK or EU that used it as a hedge against inflation got severely burned...

> EU

In 2013 the government of Cyprus decided to seize money directly from people's bank accounts. I would not call that stable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/everyth...

> China

In 2022, when some Chinese banks decided to freeze depositors accounts for shady reasons and debitors planned to protest the issue, authorities used Covid codes to block them from accessing the banks. That also does not seem stable to me.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopp...

You're speaking as if the second largest crypto exchange hasn't just collapsed, and had turned out to be stealing all of its customers' money.

You're speaking as if gambling with other people's money was something new https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=...

That's quite different, and virtually no one lost their money in that it was simply stolen by the owners of an accredited brokerage/exchange/bank, like what happened to FTX. And FTX wasn't simply gambling with other's money, they were defrauding their customers (to whom they claimed they are holding all of their money in custody) and also directly embezzling this money for their own gain (houses, publicity, illegal political investments).

That's not the point. Everyone knows that crypto is full of scams and everyone tells you that you are supposed to hold your own keys instead of leaving coins on an exchange. Almost nobody tells you that keeping coins on an exchange is good practice.

And yet, there are many times over more people using exchanges than holding their own wallets. I don't really care about crypto-in-principle, when crypto-in-practice is anything but safe.

The average person has no idea what you’re talking about when you say you have to hold your own keys, and would be absolutely screwed if/when they lost them.

Getting locked out of your own crypto wallet is a much more significant threat than government seizure for 99% of the global population.

If a government decides you'll get a haircut, you'll get one, even if they have to take out the sheep shears to do it.

The Cypriots who preferred to store their cash in their pillow did not get the haircut though.

That opens you up to the "gun and bag" risk, though.

Who wouldn't empty their regulated bank account in order to get their kidnapped firstborn released?

You forgot the truckers in Canada last year

The government has the ultimate say!, what happens if they order all ISP's to stop traffic to BTC trading sites (or even shutdown internet if it wills) Solutions like the great firewall exists that constantly "learn" and will lock you out immaterial if the government decides so.So the argument that BTC / Crypto will take me to the moon (SafeMoon) is wishful thinking

If your government decides to kill the internet, I think that's a very good reason to try to emigrate. The fact that China is doing it, may make them look powerful, but it also makes them look tyrannical.

Emigration is a serious and non-trivial matter. Do you have any idea on how expensive, and in many cases risky, it is?

https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/08/investing/china-eb5-visa-tr...

https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-ui...

Replying to myself to point out: "fluctuations" and "stability" are not mutually exclusive. Largely stable ecosystems do see occasional volatility but remain mostly stable.

UK for example did indeed see a few weeks of high volatility, which mostly stabilised and indeed recovered in large part once the right wing nutjobs were duly defenestrated.

The meme that cryptocurrency is good for people in countries without modern banking is long-dead at this point. First, and most importantly, many supposed not-modern countries actually have more robust banking than America: mobile money is more popular and has far greater penetration in large parts of Africa than it does America, for example. Secondly, for every cryptocurrency project that has provided value to places without modern banking, there’s a cryptocurrency project that has more effectively exploited people.

The fundamental problem with your position is that cryptocurrency does not offer a stable store of value and so while there may be short term examples where people have found value by using a non-government currency, these examples are often short lived. Just look at platforms like the YC-backed Stablegains, which are a great alternative to government-backed currencies… until they blow up and financially-insecure people are thrown into a dire situation.

This is a complete BS, currently I'm in a country with very unstable currency that lost so much value during the last 2 crypto booms(2017, 2021) and I know what actually happened on the ground.

Crypto adoption is indeed high, much more than the western world but people are not in it to protect themselves from a volatile exchange rates but because they are desperate for a side hustle to make the ends meet. Those who are interested in preserving value simply buy USD, EUR or gold.

The "unbanked" concept is also complete BS, in those 3.rd world countries the banking systems and the fintech infrastructure is much more advanced than the ones in the west. There are indeed millions of "unbanked" people but they are unbanked due to political reasons and as a result they use alternatives payment processors which are not banks(or just use cash). When Europe was introduced to easy to use mobile banking with things like Monzo or Revolut and USA was adopting contactless payments or Chip&Pin these were already the norm. Before the iPhone&Android proliferation, people were able to do much of this stuff through the ATMs and payments systems integrated with the SIM cards. People from 3rd world visiting EU or the USA are often shocked to when see how primitive retail banking and payment systems are.

The value of crypto came from the ability to speculate. Everyone younger than 30 was in it and some people made good money. These days everyone is in the stock market, anyone can buy and sell stocks from their banking app and all taxes and fees are handles so its like buying and selling candies.

Providing banking services to people who are unbanked for political reasons is one of the main advantages of crypto imho. This is something you can get hit by in so called democratic countries as Canada demonstrated last year. https://www.businessinsider.com/trudeau-canada-freeze-bank-a...

This is not true at all. If the government doesn't want you to do something with your money its only a matter of time to catch up.

So you got untouchable by the banks because you participated in a political uprising that failed? You think that crypto will save you? Think again because it's only matter of time before the government makes it illegal to accept payments from that alternative payment method.

The only thing that works in cash. The electronic stuff don't work because they by design work by bookkeeping(remember the ledger on the blockchain) and when there is a bookkeeping there are ways to trace and prevent.

The government can also make the use of cash illegal. They can also put a huge dent into encrypted messaging by sending anyone caught using straight to the electric chair. They can drag you out of your home at night. (So can your neighbour for that matter).

The argument was never that crypto is some kind of magic shield against bullets. It's simply a tool. It raises the cost of certain kinds of abuses for the state. In the balance between the individual and the state, it shifts the power, ever so slightly, to the former.

In that regard, crypto is like hard to use easy to lose cash.

Cash, unlike crypto, is hard to trace. The best can do is to use chemical markers.

Government making cash illegal doesn’t mean much as it is pure p2p with no integrated bookkeeping or remote sensing.

And the people who got their bank accounts closed will move to using bitcoin and live their lives? I guess maybe 10 (non-homeless) people can do that. It seems like all of these crypto-bullish scenarios are made up by 20-year-olds without analytical ability and with very little adult life experience.

> The "unbanked" concept is also complete BS, in those 3.rd world countries the banking systems and the fintech infrastructure is much more advanced than the ones in the west.

I've always noticed this hole said by cryptobros, and 4/5 of them who says this are Americans who never have interacted even with SEPA or (Canadian) Interac. It seems that this disconnect that "since American banks are already worse imagine what banks these people do have" without realising that the US has one of the worst domestic interbanking systems in developed countries - actually, delete developed as you correctly pointed out that developing countries have way better interbanking systems than the US. (To be fair, some of the hurdles apparently have legal concerns, but most of them can be explained by "(US) banks don't care about new technology".)

Edit: I have actually explained years ago why the unbanked are usually unbanked: it's not really solvable by technology.

- Wars. Most people in warzones don't want to hold a bank account because it is very unreliable. Cryptocurrency won't solve that problem, in fact it will exacerbate the problem because of your phone or computer is damaged it's game over*. Also, how do you even transact when you don't have any form of communication?

- Actually don't have anything to bank on. Their money is just enough to survive, so they can't even bank, regardless of its form. Giving cryptocurrency is often a proposed solution, while forgetting that regular currency works fine too in these situations.

- Cultural differences. Most, to be honest, don't want to depart their money to someone they don't know. They were introduced to money just a generation or two ago, so they are relatively new here. Good luck convincing that cryptocurrency is trustworthy in a way that can be easily understand.

* I mean you could write them on paper, but that's really stretching it, mainly because you need a computer to execute transactions.

Exactly, just added that to my post and noticed your comment. The "bank the unbanked" feed on the ignorance and superiority complex of the people in the western word. I guess they imagine that they are providing technology to people living in huts. How do they even imagine making money from this? Is it something like the guy in the hut is actually resource rich but wasn’t able to get a bank account to do business so they will enable him sell the milk and they will get a cut?

India, China, the countries of the EU, the USA, Japan, Indonesia - these countries all have a stable currency and access to modern financial services, and together make up a majority of the world's population, or close to it - and there are many others fitting this bill. This "small minority" idea is ludicrous.

Having some friends in such countries (Argentina), my anecdotal reports are that they end up holding dollars rather than crypto.

> So many HODLers in this thread. For the normal person on the street, Bitcoin or Crypto never mattered.

Total copium from alt nerds is never ending, but the truth is neither of you know what you are talking about: Blackrock just added BTC to their $15B fund [0], which isn't much in total market-cap (despite the down market) but is a position to say the largest (and most predatory) hedge-fund sees value in utilizing Bitcoin denominated assets. So, it may have not mattered to you, but you just outted yourself as being no more insightful on financial matters than that 'normal person on the street.'

To be honest, I've been in this for over 11 years now, and the fact of the matter is we have won many battles along the way, but will have only truly 'won' when people like you don't realize you are using BTC at all, the level of financial literacy that it takes to be your own bank and self-custody and maintain financial sovereignty is FAR TOO much for the average person--I'm convinced no amount of simplification wit tech/device solutions will lead to that paradigm shift anymore in order to capture the average part of the bell curve.

What will occur is you will walk in to what looks like your typical bank/retailer which functions with BTC to reduce tx costs and settles on main chain on a periodic basis to fit business needs (and keeping some for strategic/investment purposes for long term duration like Microstrategy as an ancillary source of revenue), resulting in a situation just like how most never ask how does the plumbing work most won't realize how these establishments are running their own MC/LN nodes and probably use State subsidized solar panels for tax breaks via inflation reduction like legislation that then used to heat the building with miners if all goes to plan.

Just like engineers cannot rely on public convectional wisdom to understand the complexity and mechanics of an internal combustion engine, or the gearing ratio in their transmissions they use to get to place to place, our largest hurdle is no longer to inform the masses (I agree the PR has gotten out of hand but mainly by alt scammers and Ivy league thieves like SBF). Rather we need to focus on making the UI/UX indistinguishable from the current model all while running things on the back-end on either Mainchain or LN as needed.

People on hn complain about the 'eternal September' of the online World, I think what's sadder is that after over 5000+ years of debt based currencies that always end the same way even the supposed brightest amongst you are incapable of understanding the implications of the average age of fiat based currencies that have always led to collapse and induce war (see Russia and China) to prop up the disintegration of Society itself--de-investment, zero covid policy, real estate crashes ave put the CCP on the war path but at the core is the tight policy of te yuan on the mainland whih has led to massive real estate speculation and large holding of farm land in Australia wit capital flight.

Financial history is long, boring and tedious thing to study on your own time, but as I found out in 2007 leading into the crash its better to be informed than gullible--most don't realize the importance and take over of Washington Mutual (my bank at the time and the largest bankruptcy in US history at the time) was an expose that proved just how broken the system is and that the FDIC itself is insolvent and that State agencies will break laws in order to serve the large bank's interests whether it was this or the repeal of Glass-Steagall with Goldman Sachs etc...

I'm sure you sopped reading, by now, but if you haven't than it's probably worth your time understanding why tier has been a nearly decades long brain drain from academia, traditional finance, and tech into BTC over its lifetime.

0: https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-in...

>financial history

Challenging to find reliable sources on this that actually include financial statements.

> Challenging to find reliable sources on this that actually include financial statements.

Look at anywhere the IMF or World Bank has been involved in where predatory loans have been issued and have led to massive re-valuations and ultimately had the Bank of intl. settlements come in. Everything from productive assets, to national parks, to lotteries, to pension/retirements get stripped under the guise of austerity to re-settle things; it's pretty wash and repeat.

The fat that you cannot find 'financial statements' underscores the very premise of my argument.