> But is not any excuse for banning, good person can sometimes not want to make a public purchase.
It is when ransomware is on the rise [1] and the cryptocurrency exchanges like binance are letting them get away with it.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/04/survey-finds-one-third-of-cr...
Right now, if I want to buy American stocks, I have to go through the handful of brokers licensed to sell foreign stocks in my country. I have to meet their funding requirements and I have to pay their hefty fees, not to mention meet their kyc requirements. This effectively makes it inaccessible to small players who might not meet the minimum requirements and/or pay the fees.
With crypto, I can buy wrapped synthetic versions of the stocks without going through any third party. The only fees I pay are transaction fees.
In the US, we have 'ADR" (American Depository Receipt) products for foreign companies. A company holds foreign shares, then issues ADRs which can (nominally) be exchanged 1:1 for them. That allows investors to get involved without the legal complexities of actually getting the shares in their name.
They're a normal thing you buy through ordinary domestic brokerages.
I get it that its not the same thing, but if your intention is to profit from stockmarket speculation (like many investors), its a workaround, especially if your local market doesn’t have any brokerages that allow access to US equities to retail investors. Even in India, retail couldn’t easily buy US equities until two years ago.
Imagine the situation for someone in a poor African country. There are no local brokerages that allow them to access US markets. They are effectively forced to invest in poorly regulated, low value local companies through heavily manipulated local stock markets. For such people, being able to buy some ETH and buy a liquid, synthetic version of AAPL is a gamechanger
The Korean project Luna has I believe a similar system although it's even more of a decentralization theater.
Buying or selling services governments or payment processors don't approve of. This includes drugs, pornography (cryptocurrency is the only payment method available on PornHub at the moment), and distasteful speech (Gab has been banned from various payment services).
Financial literacy already is of concern in fiat currency, so no surprising that here we have many people who are not very knowing of what they do. "Some people do bad things with this thing" cannot make excuses for "ban this thing". Having any ability for moving money out of sights of government, out of control of government, it can be in bad employment or it can be in good employment. Having any ability for moving money out of control for governments is the point of cryptocurency.