Hacker News Reader

Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Just a question: would it have been a good idea for a Turkish person, say, a year ago, to invest in stable coins to prevent suffering from Lira depreciation?

PS: This is a sincere question…

EDIT: some are asking why not real Euros or Dollars? I was thinking convenience and availability. I’m not sure if you could just easily get dollars in Turkey.

View on HN

Not just stable coins, holding many types of assets would help. It’s very common in many countries to hold savings in US dollars to avoid domestic currency fluctuations. Stable coins may be a convenient way to do achieve this goal, but also has counter party risk with the coin issuer.

What extra advantages do they get from stable coins over simply walking to an exchange kiosk and buying Euro or USD?

Bonus: local merchants are going to get really used to seeing those currencies soon.

In $100 bills, the weight of $1 million is about 22 pounds.

Well you could if you are talking about usd stablecoin, but you could have also simply buy another currency be it euro, US dollar... as long as its value compared to the turkish lira was greater.

> Yust a question: would it have been a good idea for a Turkish person, say, a year ago, to invest in stable coins to prevent suffering from Lira depreciation?

> PS: This is a sincere question…

No.

PS: This is a sincere answer.

Turkey banned crypto https://fortune.com/2021/04/30/turkey-crypto-ban-erdogan-cry...

Fake news. Turkey has some of the most active crypto exchanges in the world.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/exclusive-turkeys-cryptoc...

Nit: buying currencies shouldn't be an investment, but it can be speculation or a hedge.

Why not dollars, pounds, or euros?

Why not straight-up crypto? Ethereum is up 647% from a year ago.

I did a "dumb" crypto experiment to prove your question.

Just over a year ago (Nov 2020), I bought $100 of BTC and $100 of ETH... on Paypal of all places. Didn't touch it at all.

Today, it is worth $1221.37 (+510.32%).

ETH: $899.22 (+799.22%), BTC: $320.77 (+220.77%)

You're right mentioning ETH over BTC. =)

My plan is to donate this to charity.

Crypto is especially known for stability.

More stable than the lira at this point

Define stable.

The poster above you stated that his/her $100 investments are now worth after 1 year:

> ETH: $899.22 (+799.22%), BTC: $320.77 (+220.77%)

The Turkish lira hasn't changed nearly that much in value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com