
The Force Behind Bitcoin’s Meteoric Rise: Millions of Asian Investors - uptown
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-force-behind-bitcoins-meteoric-rise-millions-of-asian-investors-1513074750
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bertil
That Bitcoin allows investors to go around their country regulation on
investments makes a lot more sense than a sudden interest in cryptography from
uninformed neighbours.

Interestingly, it also means that they will hold on to it for the long term or
until it is regulated closely enough that they can’t hope to convert the coins
later -- and there is always the hope form investors that their countries will
understand or that they will emigrate. This would make me bullish, in spite of
recent seemingly unreasonable price increases.

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nickgrosvenor
No no, you guys, this time it's different, get it now before it's too
late...Everyone else is getting rich from this, don't miss out.

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narrator
The underwater part of the Bitcoin iceberg is people all over the world who
deal with terrible local financial services and regularly devalued currencies.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are pure magic to them. We are not talking
about the extremely poor or the destitute. The big beneficiaries are those who
are in the upper middle class, such as small business owners in these
countries. They previously had no way to protect themselves from the regular
financial disasters and constant local currency devaluation.

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randomsearch
This argument is undermined by the volatility of bitcoin.

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narrator
Have you looked at an Argentina peso chart? Anything is better than that
garbage. People who had dollar based accounts in Argentina lost 70% of their
net worth overnight in 2002 when the government forcibly converted their
accounts to pesos, so that doesn't work either.

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randomsearch
Saying “here is an example of a currency that is also volatile” does not make
bitcoin any less volatile.

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k-ian
paywall... does anyone here actually pay for wsj? how much is it?

