Be grateful you live in the EU or the US and don’t need crypto. It has been a major lifeline for my family and friends in Lebanon and Venezuela, both of which lack fully functioning financial services. I can send Bitcoin just fine though!
As well as thousands of Russians outside of Russia got their banks accounts blocked and sanctions restricted our money to be 100_000 EUR max per person.
Hundreds of years of liberal ideas of individual rights just crushed below collective responsibility idea for some dictator actions.
People moved billions out of Russia with bitcoin and other currencies. They saved their money after sanctions with passports based discrimination and their whole country actions against them. But rich people from first world country will still push these ideas, that's it all scams and casinos.
And the only alternative they provide as "real money" is something like "give all your money to our banks, sign some contract with humiliating visa conditions, pay us 40% taxes and pray we won't take it back". Yeah, sure, thank you very much!
If you are interested, me, personally, was partially affiliated with libertarian party and left Russia after first police visit in early 2021 (so a year before the war, even better in your terms). But that's just an ad hominem and doesn't matter in fact.
Talking generally, that's true that most people didn't leave, and that's totally fine. People don't deserve to play heroes and suffer in prisons because they were unlucky enough to born in wrong place in wrong time. Everybody deserve to have a peaceful life with their families, hobbies and jobs. Wanna play hero - get a visa, go to Russia, give your life, get shit done, if that's so easy. Humanity will be grateful for you.
If you don't - don't say people to do that just because they have different color of passport or speak other language. There is nothing wrong in being a "coward", people just want to live their lives, it's not a game, there is no savepoints.
Each person in the world can be only judged by his own actions, not by others'. Simple, but extremely important, idea which was an outcome of 2 world wars. If you create more hate by nationality or citizenship - you are just like Putin with his "bandera" fetish. Just different objects, really.
Out of curiosity, could you describe the last-mile experience for those remittances? Once they receive it in their wallet, can they easily spend it at local merchants, or do they need to convert it to an account in the local currency? If the latter, what prevents the account’s bank from receiving a transfer?
Yes, if your definition of “just fine” involves long waits, transaction fees, and fluctuating value. All symptoms of the fact that bitcoin and crypto in general is a giant casino for 99% of users.
Certainly it’s a valid way to send money, but it’s not hard to see the faults.
The Lightning Network is being used to send BTC with instant confirmation & near zero fees.
I just used it to pay someone from a US bank account to a Costa Rican bank account. $1000 payment, it reached their bank account in 12 seconds (we counted) and we paid a total of $1.80 in total fees (18 basis points).
I can’t think of a faster or cheaper way to pay internationally.
On the US side, I used the Strike app so my balance is in USD and I’m not exposed to the fluctuating value of BTC.
On the CR side, they used an instant off-ramp converting the BTC to CRC instantly, also limiting their exposure to BTC volatility.
No scam involved. It’s just the cheapest, fastest, easiest way I’ve found to send money from the US to countries with lackluster banking infrastructure.
BTC enhanced the transaction because it's a bearer instrument, not a promise of future settlement. This reduces the cost to process a transaction & increases the speed of settlement.
Strike [0] has money transmitter licenses in every state in the US (except NY?).
Ridivi [1] has a money transmitter license in Costa Rica.
That is not really a vindication of crypto, it’s just an extra condemnation of what is happening in Lebanon and Venezuela. And although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries.
99.99% of crypto is unsustainable speculation on a game of musical chairs or outright scams / ransomware.
If you look at the entire picture, crypto has such a negative impact on this world. It makes me sad.
> although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries
Sometimes what you need are not "sustainable solutions", that's something you can afford when you are not struggling daily just to stay alive. Sometimes you just need something that solves the problem right now, damned by "sustainability".
Just like most people in poverty don't give a fuck about climate change, there are so many other problems on their mind about their daily life, that there is no space to focus on "bigger problems" or "sustainability", it's just about surviving and finding ways around whatever problem arises.
If people in countries like Libanon or Venezuela have to survive by “dumping a barrel of oil each day in the ocean”, and this is basically the only “legitimate” use case for “oil” this is clearly not a vindication for the existence of oil.
It’s just all bad, there is no justification for “oil” to exist.
If you could somehow get money by dumping a barrel of oil into the ocean and you had no money at all with a hungry family, you'd find it hard to argue against dumping that barrel quickly.
> You may (deliberately) miss the point: that people survive this way doesn’t mean it vindicates oil existing.
What does it mean to "vindicate" oil existing? It simply does. As does crypto.
Now, some people, maybe you, might ask that people who dump oil into the ocean should be physically punished, even if that is the only way for them to survive. This seems a morally absurd position to me, but so be it.
> That is not really a vindication of crypto, it’s just an extra condemnation of what is happening in Lebanon and Venezuela. And although it may help individuals it is not a sustainable solution to the issues in those countries.
Look, condemnation is not enough. First fix Lebanon and Venezuela, then outlaw Bitcoin afterwards.
