I guess the next move would be opening offshore accounts to accept payments.
And that's before taking taxes into account. When taking taxes into account, somebody who is paid 10k will basically end up with 3k USD, probably less.
Additionally, and this happens in every country, SWIFT takes days and fees are really expensive. Crypto is almost instant and fees much much lower.
Of course that only works if the whole crypto hassle is still better than working with local banks.
Incorrect. Argentinians do that because taxes are incredibly high, and if you earn in USD you must sell it at the official dollar rate (less than half of the real rate), and you can't even buy the dollars you sold back because there's a cap on how much USD you can buy per month (I think it's 200USD). Argentinian devs LOVE crypto because they love evading taxes (justifiably or not)
Describing it as mere tax evasion interests is a bit of a simplification. During Corralito accounts were frozen to the point they could often barely be drawn on. Whether you want to blame that on the bank or not, the end result is people end up not trusting the banks...
aka
bank -> exchange/crypto (in/purchase)
then sell crypto on exchange, transfer to bank
A few years ago there were valid technical reasons for why crypto is not being adopted by retailers in the form of slow transactions throughput and high fees. Nobody wants to wait a minute and spend $10 for their transaction to go through. These technical reasons no longer exist. L2s are extremely fast, secured by L1, and fees are small. And with the upcoming sharding upgrade Ethereum is going to be even faster. From a technical perspective, you could now accept USDT (or any other token) and have verification be about as fast as most card payments, with lower fees. But all of these are relatively recent developments (~1-2 years), and it will likely take a few years before all this technology trickles down into real-world adoption.
a) It is too volatile.
b) Consumers are not demanding it.
Not sure what the magical solution to either is that hasn't been tried before.
2) True, I think the negative image and bad UX of retail crypto is a big reason of why retailers have not adopted it. I'm not sure this will continue forever though.
3) I would add that taxes are another reason retailers are vary of adopting crypto. Depending on the country, dealing with crypto taxes is a pain, and not worth the effort.
The magical solution? It's time, competition, and the free market. If crypto is truly cheaper and easier to deal with, startups will push it onto retailers to replace credit card incumbents. But these things don't happen overnight.
In the end it's a circular economy in a way, for anyone cashing out USDT there is someone cashing in (assuming the price stays constant). Right now we match them up with marketplaces and SWIFT transfers, but people running around with suitcases of cash would work just as well.
You have to have an awful lot of trust that this briefcase full of cash will be available to train back should you ever want it again.
The interesting thing I think is what happens to those USDT after the payment?
I'm personally not into crypto but I get that there're places where crypto is the only way to have any savings, think countries without free currency exchange and high inflation, like Argentina or Ukraine.
At some point you are going to want to cash out your crypto to USD.
Which is a regulation point that will need to implement KYC/AML.
I’m sorry the truth doesn’t match what you want but this is reality I’m speaking of.
I am talking about the larger financial transactions that actually underpin the global economy.
And for those crypto very much has borders.
Or are there "black market" exchanges that would accept a transfer into their digital wallet and pay out cash, so these Argentinians can buy bread?
To put it in perspective, prior to crypto, people would take their entire paycheck and savings and immediately buy pallets of bricks for the same purpose. They would fill their houses and yards with these bricks because they held value better than the currency, even after accounting for the cost of trucking them around
And what do those developers pay for in USDT?
It's Argentina. Read about its economy. To use it as an example is somewhat disingenuous. The government rations foreign currency in something like a few hundred USD per month per person I think. If cryptocurrency is another way to work around legal inconveniences, so what.
They can certainly pass equivalent regulations on BTC. Good luck enforcing them, though.
If you mean the country as a whole, then yeah, the solution is obviously different.
But if you mean some random person stuck in that country, who have zero control over its economic policy - then yeah, crypto actually solves the problem that government creates.
And Argentina is far from unique in that regard. Most people in the world live under oppressive governments.
1) Divine creator whose existence is impossible to prove
2) A holy book: (whitepaper) that's taken as absolute truth and therefore doesn't require any revisions or updates. Proposed changes to core beliefs create split factions (BTC v BCH, Old v New Testament, or the Shia-Sunni split in Islam).
3) Monotheism: Belief in the primacy of Bitcoin blockchain over all other competing chains, and warning of divine punishment for apostates (NGMI).
Is it perfect? No.
Is it ages ahead of Bitcoin? Yes
I don't believe in crypto. But I know plenty of religious zealots to sell it to. So I'm happy to own it. My bet is it isn't a dying religion.
You're mixing worldviews in your rejoinder.
For an atheist, Atheism not preventing "your" birth as there is no soul ("you") waiting in the wings to prevent. No you to prevent until personhood after birth.
Rather, to an atheist, it's enabling the filtering out of unfortunate humanist futures. No child need be brought into unwantedness, disease, insufficient support, or other misfortunes. As there is no supernatural providence (no God to provide), logically, one should not bring forth future humans into a lack of providing.
The atheist assumes the mother is best qualified to evaluate this choice, and thus to make it. The atheist further presumes the mother is the person most affected by this choice (there is no other "you" yet), and thus has greatest right to make it.
To be clear, many Christians hold the same view as this example atheist, particularly those who think living is defined by knowing, and being dead by not knowing:
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten." – Ecc. 9:5
Roughly, those who believe there is no separate soul hanging around before or after an independent body by-and-large have no problem with holding a woman has a right to choose.
And there are many Christians who regard support for abortion within the faith to have been influenced by atheism.
I just think it's an interesting question that has no easy answer. When does life begin? Clearly, the fetus is alive. Saying they "don't know" doesn't make sense to me because it's not like I remember my first year outside the womb either.
If the goal is to reduce abortions, then the pro-life strategy is less effective than pro-choice.
OTOH sha256 proof of work mining is a billion dollar industry and the Bitcoin mining hashrate just hit an all time high after a long protracted bear market.
Miners are in the black, price will follow
Edit: a word
I'm not sure about Argentina specifically but from most of these cases I know personally they don't even use Binance for conversion, there are local money changers that trade hard currency for depreciating (t)rash, this was true even before Bitcoin & co when people still kept paper dollars under their mattress or in the bank. Those who think this will go away with regulation and bans are even more delusional than the folks who thought that alcohol or drugs can simply be banned and all will be fine. Financial security is a basic need, it's part of our drive for survival.
Binance is mostly used by speculators/retail traders, not people who actually use cryptocurrencies. I get the joke that Bitcoin people say everything's good for Bitcoin, but in this case it may actually be true. Binance isn't a good company and people have been concerned about their huge market share in exchanges for a long time. Binance isn't pro Bitcoin, Ethereum and other such networks. They heavily push their own coins and solutions which aren't decentralized. It's only slightly better for the ecosystem then FTX probably, in the sense that they're not outright stealing user funds - at least that we know of.
Blur your eyes enough and any "thing" in an economic system is (at least) one of: Consumable, Utilitarian, Currency, or an Asset. The fun thing about economics is: which category some Thing lands in depends as much on its Design as its Perception; cars are generally Utilitarian, somewhat Consumable, but rare ones could be classified as Assets. Houses are, generally, Utilitarian Assets in the United States; but in many countries they're Utilitarian Consumables. Perception matters.
Critical characteristics of an asset: it has a dynamic market-priced value denominated in a currency; that market has a meaningful level of liquidity to support its actors; and its actors, to varying degrees, Perceive the value of this asset as priced to that currency to increase over time.
There are obviously a ton of different, diverse voices in every community, but a big problem the "crypto is money" crowd has had is that, traditionally, crypto has been perceived as an Asset, not a Currency; even though its functionally good at being one. The vast majority of actors in the crypto economic system perpetuate this; we talk about Ethereum as it is priced to USD, we talk about Bitcoin going down 20%, etc.
There's an argument to be made, though I don't totally believe it, that forcing crypto to become more divorced from traditional currencies could, especially outside of the developed US-led western world, force it into a place where it starts looking less like an asset and more like a currency. The recent scandals, schemes, and restrictions concerning traditional-to-crypto bridge systems are all doing a fairly good job of perpetuating this; but this ultimately comes down to what you mean by "good for Bitcoin". None of what has happened to crypto over the past two years will be good for its USD-denominated market price. But; its utility as a currency hasn't changed, and would actually become more stable as perception on its purpose changes and its exit liquidity reduces.
To spin a metaphor: Britain formed the US as a colony, and in the early years the US was tremendously reliant on trade and resources from Britain. With that reliance came a natural cap on the US's ability to grow; and the conditions of that reliance (e.g. taxes) eventually made the relationship unsustainable. Severing that relationship was bloody and ugly; but now, the US is far more powerful. In this metaphor, that relationship is the traditional-to-crypto bridge; and severing it is a reduction of traditional-to-crypto market liquidity.
To be clear, I'm not arguing this will be good for crypto no matter the camp you're in. Just that, this would be the argument if you are in the crypto-is-money camp. My opinion is: crypto-as-money is still far, far too nascent; the world's assetization of crypto over the past decade has mostly destroyed any hope of it becoming money without some kind of civilization-level shock to existing money systems (which would be just as likely to impact the vast network of computer systems necessary to keep crypto running). And even if it did happen, at any level of significance, there are no existing crypto systems I'm aware of which would actually make Healthy Money at a country/regional/global macroeconomic scale (not remotely high-scale enough & too much deflation).
Stopped by bank: this could indicate there are more regulation to come in near future Stopped by Biance: is there a problem with the platform
This statemenst just says plenty of how much you understand. First of all, you can never "withdraw cash" from a crypto exchange. Second of all, you can withdraw anything you want from binance. It just seems you cannot let fiat pass throuh some stupid bank when it's <100k.
Get your facts straight please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472790.
It's true that the comment you were replying to was generic and therefore not good, but yours was repetitive generic flamebait and therefore much worse. Please don't post like that here. We want curious conversation.