Whether crypto hurts or helps financial inclusion remains to be seen in places like Africa and Latin America. The majority of coins are pump-and-dumps or rug pulls, but after 15+ years of BTC somehow surviving, I still have hope crypto can provide financial access to those without direct bank access in these areas without being massive scams or abused by crime.
Are you suggesting that BTC is either of those? The incredible price-swings, fluctuations, and inherently deflationary nature (which encourages hoarding!) are not great properties for a peg-target to have.
BTC saved the value over the years for all its holders, including even those who bought during the height of mania and have suffered temporary setback for a few months.
For an asset where no one promised anything but uncertainty, that's the only asset that you can rely on as your insurance against asset seizures, inflation, pumps-and-dumps (compare BTC with any other token with marketing - BTC marches on, while all these tokens get pumped/dumped and then stay forever at zero).
Apart from that you don't want to have the volatility of most crypto to be a means of payment. "wait, my hard earned products are now worth 50 % less than an hour ago because some influencer in his basements mom did a rugpull?"
I'm sure that a ban on proof-of-work mining would cause an equivalent or greater amount of damage to the value of various "coins". At least with actual metal coins you can melt them down and make things from the metal should the coin devalue unexpectedly.
This is a strawman that assumes choosing between the volatility of a memecoin or USD/Euro when the reality of the situation being discussed is choosing between the volatility of a USD-pegged stablecoin vs. that of a developing nation's currency.
> For us, it’s much more important to have more traditional markers of trust, like approval from bank partners, billboards in major cities, TV and radio ads, and so on.
Realistically, there is not really any way to create trust other than telling people "we are trustworthy".
The risk is that if the company is found wanting in the trust department, all the previously built up trust evaporates in an instant, and it's nigh on impossible to regain.
So yes, I do think trust is a function of marketing budget.
Because none of that is the purpose of cryptocurrency. It for tax evasion by the rich, and for the cryptocurrency to seize when its used for crimes or when its defrauded out of someone else. And for riding a seemingly permanently rising currency to riches.
In any case, it boils down to "I can make money off cryptocurrency". It doesn't "help" people. If someone says that, they just want to evangelize it because they think that's the key to 'crypto go up'.
Isn't cryptocurrency pretty much the worst way to avoid taxes?
The entire ledger is public. The IRS is going to know that several millions/billions was sent to an address and can just press the exchange to reveal who it is akin to gambling winnings.
I was there, at the dawn. I remember spigots giving out whole-ass bitcoins.
The "we're going to change the world" folks either became, or were pushed out by the, Gordon Gekko cosplayers approximately 227 milliseconds after the bitcoin whitepaper was published.
As far as I can tell, a larger value in goods and services, real non-crypto-related tangible things and actions, are purchased in Chuck-e-cheese tokens than crypto.
Crypto is tulip bulbs for the IT Crowd. It's hyper-tax-evading-money-laundering on steroids. It is everything about "duh banksters" the liars promoting crypto claimed to be against times ten trillion.
Crypto is like some very smart people took every negative aspect of the socio-economic system we find ourselves trapped within and amplified them because they realized the grift to be had, then they wrapped it all in a thin veneer of freedom and rebellion.
legal evasion is definitely a big part of it, but when your government is corrupt and mismanaged and makes it illegal to hold other currencies while devaluing the money you do hold, maybe a little law breaking is justified
I'm finding a lot of these arguments to be disingenuous.
Much of the discussion is around "Meanwhile, most people trying to use cryptocurrency to improve financial inclusion aren’t even thinking about on-ramp problems." Kuhn is assuming an argument against a crypto purist who wants 100% crypto-to-crypto services and from there bringing up the real problem than there are not many cash<-->crypto services for people who need better inclusion. But, Kuhn is in exactly the position to provide that service and is choosing not to. Arguing that you don't want to provide crypto services because it's not inclusive because people aren't providing the service you could provide but choose not to because crypto is not inclusive because...
> These problems are solvable in principle, by using a stablecoin on a much more efficient blockchain. But that’s a whole lot of effort just to get the user experience back to the baseline that we’ve already built! And even once you’re there, it doesn’t seem like the blockchain has any meaningful advantages that are worth that cost.
Comes after arguing a strawman of "memorizing the exchange rate of fish to crypto" to say that the past few paragraphs are invalid and instead of building up the security of a literal money-vault Postgres database, the could have just built a secure key store for a stablecoin based service.
> For a technically sophisticated early adopter, the cryptocurrency pitch—“these algorithms guarantee that we can’t get your balance wrong, even if we’re malicious”—makes some sense. But a typical underbanked person in Senegal, who may not understand Merkle trees or Byzantine fault tolerance, might justifiably be skeptical. For us, it’s much more important to have more traditional markers of trust, like approval from bank partners, billboards in major cities, TV and radio ads, and so on.
This doesn't change regardless of what tech you use. The only difference is if the end goal of your marketing is "Trust me bro" or "You don't even need to trust me bro".
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