However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.
Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him. On the other hand, I trust myself to handle my money responsibly, and I view my government as a great uncertainty because I don't understand the limits of their power (in the least nefarious, but relevant point, who can predict by how much my government will increase the monetary supply and deflate my purchasing power over the next decades? More nefarious, if I dissent, government can trivially lock most of my digital assets that aren't cryptocurrencies - e.g. bank account or investment funds).
You can bet that Edward Snowden had all his US assets seized, for example. But if he had any cryptocurrency, he may have been able to take those with him.
Say I'm someone like Ed Snowden (again). I own a house, a car, the clothes on my back, and Bitcoin. I up and leave one day to share government secrets with the press and hide in a different country.
Did the car aid in the crime? Probably, to some degree - it let me physically make my way to the airport, and on to journalists to whom I shared secrets. Did the house aid the crime? Did the clothes on my back aid the crime? Both of those allowed me to live a safe and comfortable life. I wouldn't have made it past airport security without my clothes, after all.
Did the Bitcoin aid the crime? Only in the same sense that a treadmill and a good diet aids a bank robber by making it easier for him to leave the scene in a hurry.
So I think the claim that having bitcoin in your possession when committing a crime necessarily enables that crime (to a greater deal than any other everyday thing) is a bit nebulous. It didn't facilitate the crime, it just lessened the punishment. Possession of $USD cash provides a similar thing in the form of being used to pay bail.
Same is true for crypte-currencies. If some hacker manages to steal a big amount of money then (almost) everybody agrees to make a hardfork and the hacker looses his money. It is more decentralized and the hacker could keep some part of the money if there is a side chain.
Hacker scenario already happend. But there is no need for a crime to happen to cause a tokens redistribution. If 80% of all token holders (miners for bitcoin?) are poor what stops them from redistributing the tokens of the rich token holders?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhXncTVOzA
Whether or not it will be a successful project or not is up for debate.
All of them CAN produce auditable records for the consumer, but they don't, blockchains force the issue.
Right now it's the exact opposite. There's nothing less bullet-proof (eg in the US) than investing into an ICO, outside of perhaps junk penny stocks.
Cryptocurrencies are forcing govts to reexamine regulations that I argue are generally favorable to massive institutions/ high net worth individuals and unfavorable to the small timers
The only way to go with the concept you're suggesting, is to buy actual gold (coins or similar). With something like gold coins, you'll still suffer a discount on a need-to-sell, but it won't be nearly so bad. Do not think under any circumstances that jewelry holds its value in a resale, it holds a small fraction of its value (unless we're talking a million dollar extraordinary specimen (equivalent to art in the jewelry world), but that's a super rare context, and you'll still sell it at a hefty discount in a crunch).
Furthermore, the poorest people generally aren't the ones looking to evade hyperinflation, because they lack savings in the first place. Venezuela had a middle class once upon a time, though.
I'm unsure what you mean by this. "The bottom line" is just a manner of expression.
> I made claims about the potential for use, not that it was actually used
And I stated why I believe this to be a dubious claim; crypto-tokens are totally impractical. Your allusion to advancements in medicine and internet connectivity is a red herring argument that hand waves away the reality of using crypo-tokens in the real world.
> You seem to be operating on the assumption that third world = mud huts and subsistence farming, which is very untrue.
Wow. I illustrated concerns surrounding limited accessibility to internet in the developing world and you disingenuously twisted it into an insult to the citizens of the developing world. You don't even have to venture into a 3rd world country to see the impracticality of crypo-tokens in the real world, they're barley usable even in the developed world, and at the first sign of trouble they are useless, e.g. see how far crypo-tokens take you on the ground in Puerto Rico. Jumbling around private keys, trying to coordinate meet-ups to trade crypto for money, managing all the technical issues surrounding wallet management, insane volatility, transaction fees, the concept of confirmations, client versioning, security best practices, staying abreast of blockchain politics surrounding forks and protocol changes that impact security, price, usability... it's a quagmire of impracticality.
So what? Every technology starts off slow and impractical including the ones that fail.
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.
Your comment mostly applies to rural areas in 3rd countries.
It’s not about the single solutions themselves, it’s about the ecosystem of solutions that you can integrate relatively painlessly. Same reason why standards are important.
What do you consider standard tech btw?