Comment by clavigne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clavigne | Hacker News Reader

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So first, investing in DEFI is not exactly simple. If I am reading it properly, you lose 20% in fees at least if you buy bitcoin with Madagascar dollars on paxful,

https://paxful.com/buy/bitcoin/madagascar

How many more hoops do you then have to jump through to acquire fake stocks?

Second, you then have to make sure you avoid pyramid schemes (like OneCoin), rug pulls, exit scams, bad exchanges and bad "smart" contracts (like the Parity bug).

This is not easy even for highly informed tech workers in the Global North. Now if you happen to speak another language (as I do) I recommend you go and Google "how to invest in Defi" or whatever in it. In my case (French), you get just articles after articles that are sponsored content from very dubious sounding wallet and exchanges, especially if you add "Madagascar" or "Congo" or whatever to your search.

So frankly, I think the idea that "crypto markets are great for the Global South" is more of a convenient story.

Complex onboarding is still better than not having access to the markets at all.

I don't really understand the resistance about this - an imperfect process is always better than no process.

Could things be improved? 100% yes. But that doesn't mean this truly global, permissionless market is somehow a scam.

I guess it comes down to whether one does the cost benefit analysis for society as a whole or for individuals.

While decentralized permissionless markets can (and have) helped some individuals escape economic restrictions (capital controls, sanctions, etc.) it's not at all clear to me that they have had an overall positive effect, or ever will.

At the end of the day, the rise in the price of bitcoin, scams like AfriCrypt and OneCoin, the new Salvador laws etc are all just new means of extracting capital from the Global South. I'm of the opinion that the benefits to individuals are not balancing the overall societal harms, but I could see how someone with a more individualistic ideology would disagree.

You do have a point there. Crypto does have a massive fraud problem. And I'll admit that so far, it's been a net negative for society.

I'm hoping this will change as the ecosystem matures.

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