Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

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OK, let's discuss this use case.

I'm in country with a cash economy, am unable to use my debit card in the local ATMs and don't speak the local language. I login to online banking on my phone or in a cybercafe and send a bank transfer in my currency from my account to WU. Within a few minutes WU confirms receipt of the funds. I walk down the street to the large WU sign, show a MTCN number and my passport to the teller, and collect equivalent cash in local currency, less a bearable-in-the-circumstances transaction fee. (This actually happened by the way.)

Let's for the sake of argument, assume I already have a large fortune in Bitcoins, access on all the major exchanges and private keys memorised and written down in a secure box, all in my possession. Trouble is vendors want local currency not BTC, and I don't have the language skills to convince them that actually BTC is a much better store of value or locate the local BTC enthusiast's group (if there is such a thing) and negotiate an informal money transfer with them. In the end I probably give up and use Western Union...

Your argument here doesn't seem to be that Bitcoin/etc. are bad, but that alternatives exist.

The issue with those alternatives is that they cost a lot. In your case, this additional cost was worth it in an emergency but that's often not the case.

Think of the vast number of people who send money abroad to support their families.

No, my argument is that Bitcoin is not a viable option for the average unbanked person to receive funds they can actually spend in the 99.999999% of the world that does not have Bitcoin ATMs or local vendors that accept Bitcoin. For almost all real world use cases involving unbanked people, crypto is either strictly inferior to existing solutions or impossible.

Even if I could have found someone in a small Moroccan town that knew what a Bitcoin was and how to use it, the daft exchange rate they'd have offered me to convert it into cash would have easily exceeded the cost of Western Union for the same transaction. The villages people send money to support families are not full of hackers playing around with blockchains, and the few people in their country with the knowhow and resources to exchange Bitcoins for cash are not going to be cheaper or easier to deal with than WU.

Sure, I can cash out crypto via my bank account and bankcard pretty easily, but I can cash out cash even more easily...

Each Bitcoin transaction costs the electricity to power a home for three weeks, and that's just the mining. If it were ever subjected to rigorous AML, exchange control checks, etc., it would also accrue the overheads which apply to fiat.

Consequently, WU's idiotic "risk management machine learning" has now taken your money, and is refusing to return it to you or send it to your destination without days or weeks of documentation and pain.

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