Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
(I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina...
It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet doesn't raise at the same rate.
If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it, you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to inflation.
You can't hold value in land since there's no credit, cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50 DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as valuable as it was when you bought it.
A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even less every month.
Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to keep up.
Same could be said about social networks.
What is?
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid scheme! It's just a bisected cube!
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).
Edit: I misread, you're talking about Monero -> Other coin swaps. My bad.
Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.
USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.