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Comment by cemerick | Hacker News Reader

"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven.

You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy. (Of course, if this is incorrect, surely there are hundreds, at least dozens of compelling case studies by now?)

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this is not an accurate portrayal of refugees. i can’t be bothered to look for a source atm, but the first wave of refugees out of syria that caused a panic in Europe were not poor, unskilled laborers - they were middle and upper class families who could afford plane tickets. It costs many thousands of dollars to cross borders illegally by the way, so you’re likely to exhaust your savings trying to escape whatever you’re running from.

I wrote "'typical' refugees". No doubt monied folks need to migrate under duress as well, but they are absolutely a vanishing minority of worldwide refugee flows.

> It costs many thousands of dollars to cross borders illegally by the way, so you’re likely to exhaust your savings trying to escape whatever you’re running from.

...and worse, often end up in debt along the way. Where is the room in that common situation for the need for exfiltrating funds via BTC?

I didn’t mean to suggest BTC was useful along the way, just had a kneejerk when I read the comment about penniless refugees. but by the time people are congregating in border camps i’m sure you’re right, the majority have less pennies than they’d like.

>>>but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy.

African migrants trying to cross the US southern border, on the low end. Airfare from West Africa isn't cheap. In this article[1], one migrant says the trip had cost her $5,000. It takes some assets to pull that off, and some of that is probably kept on their person for the duration of the journey. A microSD card in a condom in a....sensitive location....is not likely to be detected if/when narco-smuggler cartels shake you down for cash.

At the high end....government kleptocrats fleeing Afghanistan. Supposedly President Ashraf Ghani and his family had to leave piles of cash because they couldn't carry it all when he boarded a helicopter.[2] Too bad they didn't convert to stablecoins and store them on a wallet on a thumb drive.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-africa/u-...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/russia-says-afgha...

if it came down to that, depending on time, i think i would prefer to stitch 256 bit patterns into various articles of clothing before i stick any memory cards anywhere

Venezuela

Perfect example, thank you. Given the typical wage in Venezuela of late, someone looking to exfiltrate their "wealth" there would be looking at working weeks if not months to afford a single typical BTC transaction fee.

Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.

One way people have of affording these fees is by working for people outside the country who can pay a salary that would cover the fees alongside being a living wage. After building enough wealth in crypto, they can choose to leave the regime in better terms than as a refugee. This has happened many many times already, this is the most valuable use case for crypto in practice.

i don't think you know what the typical wage in venezuela is. i do because i live here. you can watch this video if you want to know (it's not 3$ a month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4

say i've happened to save 1000$ and i want to leave the country and i don't want the police near the airport to take my money as they're known to do. do you think it would be an absolute fantasy for me to find some way to sell my 1000$ for bitcoin and buy them again somewhere else?

I wonder if cemerick has any more comments on "absolute fantasies"... probably not.

I loathe Bitcoin, but that’s vastly wrong. As one counter-example, the Syrian civil war didn’t only displace poor people who never had anything to begin with; it displaced a lot of middle class families, made of engineers and doctors and such, who did have assets to their name but that were almost certainly incapable of taking it out of the country with them.

It remains to be seen whether it would have been practical to move money from Syrian liras to Bitcoin. No one wants to buy hyper-inflating currency.

It is unfortunately quite factual that the vast majority of refugees worldwide functionally have no assets and often end up in debt at the end of their journey from home. Anecdotes of relative handfuls of affluent migrants are hardly compelling vis a vis the utility of e.g. BTC, especially given the lofty claims being made.

Outside of whether it would be feasible to move wealth to bitcoin before fleeing, discounting the existence of people who weren't miserable before they had to flee their decent existence due to war is insulting. You insinuated that all people who flee their country were resourceless before their displacement. Confronted with the fact that they aren't, you thought to save your point by declaring them "anecdotal". Not classy.

I didn't discount anyone's existence, or make any insinuation about "all people" of any description. The claim upthread was that BTC is useful when exfiltrating wealth when emigrating; for that to be a compelling and common use case for BTC, said wealth would need to be common. My pointing out trivially verifiable facts re: the typical (a.k.a. statistically predominant) financial disposition of refugees might not put that claim in a good light, but it's not pejorative or dismissive whatsoever of anyone or their experiences.

IMO, the not-classy thing is cryptocurrency advocates constantly trying to leverage the plight of refugees, the unbanked, and those living in locales with constrained economic freedom to underwrite the reputation of a set of technologies that are overwhelmingly used as pernicious speculative vehicles.

I'm sorry, are you saying Bitcoin is hyper-inflating? Am I getting my wires crossed or are you confusing terms?

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