* Uncensorable donations
* No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal)
* Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble)
* Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions.
* You can use cryptocurrencies anonymously (to for example buy VPNs)
* It's possible to flee your country with some of your wealth intact (for example by converting to Bitcoin and crossing the Venezuela border)
I also want to point out that the use-case of "get your money out of the country" is not exactly perfect for Bitcoin because of how volatile it is (imagine if someone had to get their money out during December 2017).
I'd say anonymous payments is a little different from being uncensorable though. You'll stay anonymous even after the payment has gone through.
As for transaction fees, if we exclude Bitcoin which has really high fees, cryptocurrency fees are very small and almost negligible.[0]
Getting money out of the country is always relative. Even with Bitcoin's volatility it's much preferred to losing all your money. Either you cannot bring it with you through the border, or Venezuela's hyperinflation will eat it up in a flash.
That's probably because their popularity among users is also negligible. Problem with cryptocurrencess is that they don't scale well, with increased transaction volumes the fees and processing times also tend to rise until network's hashing power catches up.
Of course scaling is difficult. But Bitcoin isn't a good example of that.
For most people, the utility of sticking your money into a volatile and slow system with no recourses is just never going to be there. A municipal credit union would be more useful and offer an out from private for-profit banking for most people.
So, this is an example of where a fully law abiding citizen, had their transactions blocked, but the crypto payments weren't.
The legal Bitcoin payments weren't blocked, but the bank transactions were.
Libertarians aren’t anti-law, they are pro-constitution. Libertarians are against the drug war, pro-marijuana legalization, against civil asset forfeiture, and trying to end the endless wars waged in the Middle East.
You will not find a better friend than a libertarian if you ever find yourself arrested or sued for any reason. Judges inventing laws is the antithesis of the belief system - libertarians follow the law as written.
That said, why is the emphasis on constitution (BTW, do you mean any constitution or US constitution in particular)? Constitution is just a special kind of law after all and I can totally imagine libertarians claiming that it is inadequate, pushing to change it and make it more aligned with their principles.
In the USA we have the Bill of Rights that protects each person from government overreach, such as the 1st amendment which protects freedom of speech, and the 5th amendment against testifying against yourself.
The government however often passes laws that violate these rights, and then the courts have to overturn laws that are unconstitutional because they violate our rights.
I am of the opinion that the government is a very dangerous entity with unlimited power and ability to harm citizens, so we should always be skeptical of all laws passed and work as much as possible to limit the power of government.
However the adoption is severely lacking.
The problem is that it has gotten worse not better. There has not been a good use case for a Joe NormalCitizen for crypto in a while.
Anecdata: I first mined BTC in 2011 and used BTC quite a bit in 2013 to buy bunch of online and offline services. It was relatively painless since I had my own BTC. (Also it was really pseudo-anonymous since I was only using mining rewards and didn't reuse addresses).
Since I do not own any significant crypto anymore there is no use case for me anymore.
If I want do something shady, I'd have the problem of onramp KYC etc.
If I want to do something legal, crypto costs including onramp is less convenient/costs more than normal SEPA/CC etc.
Is it still possible to circumwent KYC by mining? Or is it too expensive?
Sounds like an advantage of PoW over PoS
Not really. You can't earn much at all mining any coins without significant and reoccurring capital investment.
There are de-centralized exchanges like Bisq that you can use without KYC.
Also Monero has true anonymity so while you might need a KYC onramp to get into crypto, once your value is on the Monero chain it's anonymous, transactions cannot be followed, balances can't be seen (without permission).
Most payments regular people make every day are sub three-digit. On those payments 2-4% in the US is much cheaper than the current Bitcoin (and similar) transaction fees. That means crypto is rather unusable for most people. I won't even start talking how Bitcoin doesn't compete at all with European SEPA Instant payments for most use-cases.
The only use crypto currently has is censorship resistance, pseudonymity and illegal purposes.
Bitcoin is a horrible example. Bitcoin Cash for example have fees of less than a cent.
It's not Bitcoin Cash that's special. It's Bitcoin, but in a bad way. Even Monero has very low fees with better capacity for example.
If you can't get a bank account it's unlikely your basic needs are going to be met by a stranger you've never met.
(assuming, of course, that the government doesn't shut down the Internet, as it did just days ago: https://ooni.org/post/2019-iran-internet-blackout/)
It's not just poor people in countries without banks who have these problems. Even rich porn stars have had their bank accounts closed (for being porn stars) and people in the marijuana business too.
Some more info here: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/for_the_unbanked.html
> There is no KYC process.
How does an unbanked put their paper money into their cryptocurrency account without a KYC process? (Please don't say trust a random third party stranger in a pub offering cryptocurrency at an exorbitant markup.)
> There are no fees for opening or having an account
I've never paid a fee to open or have a bank account, but how does an unbanked put their paper money into their cryptocurrency account without paying a fee (or an exorbitant markup)?
> You don’t need to trust a third party with your money.
How does an unbanked get their paper money into their cryptocurrency account without trusting a third party?
> There’s no need to visit a financial institution. As long as you have internet access you always have access to your money and can make payments.
Online and phone banking existed decades before Bitcoin was created.
> Around 60% said they had too little money to use a bank account
Yet they'd somehow have enough to put into cryptocurrency account?
Mining perhaps?
I'm not saying having a bank account is necessary, but the life conditions that prevent bank access (poverty, homelessness, addictions, abuse, violence, etc) will certainly prevent anyone from mining/
One possibility is that they can receive their income directly in cryptocurrencies.
"High risk" is often mistaken for illegal, but that's incorrect. Many industries that are completely legal are still viewed as high risk and become deplatformed. Small companies are at the highest risk of being deplatformed.
Crypto currency allows anyone to send and receive money, without depending on the blessing of a third party which can decide whether or not to serve your business. Access to the financial system is not seen as a basic human right.
By an interesting coincidence, 0 is also the number of unbanked people who should risk the money they need to eat on unregulated, complicated and easily stolen intangible financial assets which wealthy foreigners invented to print themselves money.
m-pesa isn't a cryptocurrency in the same mold that bitcoin is, but it's electronic money for the unbanked that you're arguing can't exist.
It's wrong. The exact details of bitcoin aren't the right thing for it, but there are many cryptocurrencies that are more like m-pesa in their use requiremnts than they are bitcoin.
M-Pesa would not have succeeded in helping the unbanked if people living in remote villages needed to set up a mining rig or navigate to Coinbase.com and enter debit card details to obtain it. There'd be no reliable way for most unbanked people to get it or get rid of it. And since the unbanked world needs the network of regulated agents offering cash conversion and really can't afford for their assets to be backed by speculator optimism rather than legal tender in a trusted party's bank account or vault, there's really not much advantage in building that trusted centralised entity's database in something as computationally expensive as a blockchain. Certainly it's not lack of blockchain technology that's been the obstacle to people from creating more electronic money transfer service for the unbanked.
Not really, if you read what you replied to it says that none of the unbanked have cards to buy it with, and that they don't need to be risking what little they have on "unregulated, complicated and easily stolen intangible financial assets which wealthy foreigners invented to print themselves money."
That doesn't describe M-Pesa, but it does describe cryptocurrency.
Any income is instantly frozen and collected. Even when they want to eventually pay debt, lack of liquidity prevents them from work.
They can only use cash, or bank accounts of friends, or things like Revolut or PayPal (bailiff doesn't know about them because they operate in different country).
What a short-sighted view. Perhaps no use case for you personally. There are 7.7 billion people in this world who have vastly different life circumstances, some of them certainly need crypto to make their lives better. In no particular order: hyperflation, financial censorship, instant low-fee international transfers, etc
Practice is the criterion of truth. Can provide cases, when crypto solves problem better than existing instruments?
People need to get over the concept of inflation. Inflation is GOOD.
"So every year, your savings get watered down and you lose wealth", is not what one wants to hear.
The negative impacts of volatility on the economy are very well documented.
Inflation has zero impact on a household as long as their savings are kept in assets other than cash.
Lastly, to say that a currency losing 99% of its value over time is not damaging to a household is either ignorance or corruption. The lower tiers of society furthest away from the money printer are the ones that are impacted the most. Coincidentally, I'm going to assume you want to help these tiers the most but end up hurting them.
There is something called the Cantillon effect, where those closest (banks, those connected to the gov) to the "stream" of money get benefited while those furthest away (regular people) get hurt.
It’s bad if you have little money, your wages don’t raise automatically with inflation, and every year what little you have has been reduced in value 1 to 10%.
I as a homeowner with a government-subsidized 30 year fixed rate mortgage love it however, as what I pay for my asset each month is less and less as inflation helps me and the tax payers finance my wealth creation. Renters, not so much!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-adds-104-5-billion-to-finan...
How long ago were the exchanges found to be manipulating prices fraudulently?
As if crypto is immune to systemic issues.
It's not a closed system after all, is it?