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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

There are 1.7 billion adults in the world who are unbanked. 420 million of them have internet access. You can find them in countries all over the world. For example USA have 18 million and France have 3 million who don't have a bank account.

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

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From that page:

> 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?

>How does an unbanked get their paper money into their cryptocurrency account without trusting a third party?

Mining perhaps?

How do you expect someone who doesn't have access to banking to set be able to set up a mining rig?

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/

There are many examples of Venezuelans doing just this.

> 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.)

One possibility is that they can receive their income directly in cryptocurrencies.

Yes, one big issue is that payment processors are incredibly centralized and massive. These two combined means that they are incentivized to de-risk their platforms and stop serving customers they determine to be "high risk".

"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.

There are 0 adults in the world who are unbanked but have access to a mining rig or card payments to buy cryptoassets.

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.

You'd be surprised by the existence of m-pesa then, which has revolutionized finance among the unbanked in Africa.

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.

m-pesa fits virtually none of what the parent said about cryptocurrency.

The point of the OP was that he believes electronic money cannot benefit the unbanked.

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.

No, my point is that unlike M-Pesa, cryptocurrencies do not have a trained, regulated agent in every village who will reliably exchange them for local cash at a fixed rate. The centralisation is fundamental to its success - probably only the mobile providers or maybe a money transfer network like Western Union could have pulled it off.

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.

> The point of the OP was that he believes electronic money cannot benefit 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.

Also there is tons of people with bank accounts, but who have debts.

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).

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