In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
vitalik.ca
vitalik.ca
Some degree of ETH-maximalism will be required in the future given the sheer number of pretender L-1 blockchains snapping at ETH's heels. Writing about BTC-maximalism sets the foundation for that culture.
For all the heat he gets from Bitcoiners I consider it a net negative that crypto split up into so many different camps.
I wonder how the crypto space would have looked like if the Bitcoin space allowed people like Vitalik to work within it instead of being driven away.
Also, who is "we"? Bitcoiners, Etherians, crypto people in general, or some other crypto group?
- The author refers to: https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-ukraine/
- This link calls it an estimate: "It is estimated that over 5.5 million people, 12.7% of Ukraine’s total population, currently own cryptocurrency.(1)"
- Link (1) points to https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership/
- The link under "Ukraine" in that list points back to the first claim: https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-ukraine/
At the bottom of their data page: "The data contained or reflected herein are proprietary of TripleA."
At the same time, cryptocurrencies still haven't provided a killer app that shuts everyone up. So, IMO that's the only real thing that matters. Either you build something with it that's useful - or it isn't useful.
I understand that it's difficult because of all the infrastructure required (much of which still doesn't exist), but that's where all efforts should be. Create a consumer service that people want.
Otherwise, if the idea is that it's simply a trade-off of the speed/efficiency for otherwise mundane services in order to make them decentralized, then stop hyping it and let it become a parallel structure - or underground system that some people use.
Your assumption that the only reason to hate cryptocurrencies is ignorance is not reasonable.
> in order to make them decentralized
"Decentralized" and "blockchain" are not synonyms. Blockchain technology is a wildly, insanely expensive way to decentralize an application: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
I disagree. The killer app is cash and that use case was intentionally killed by the bitcoin maximalists.
The Internet was opened to commercial use, in 1993. That is 29 years ago.
Bitcoin is half the age of the commercial Internet, so Bitcoin is no longer new.
14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a behemoth.
How many more years can people continue to claim "crypto is so new, it hasn't had time yet to establish a killer app"?
All of these industries had become major industries within 14 years of their discovery:
telephones, 1876, big industry by 1890
automobiles, 1886, big industry by 1900
The industry with the longest struggle to get the technology "good enough" was perhaps radio with modulation to carry the human voice, 1906 first proof of concept, the industry took off in 1920.
The point is, 14 years after their discovery, everyone could easily tell you what cars, telephones and commercial radio was for. The utility was obvious to everyone. But cryptocurrencies are still struggling to come up with a straightforward use case that people can understand.
And how practical is that, given the wide swings (e.g., relative to USD) that are often seen?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
In 1983, with-in 14 years, it was widely successful for the academic and research institutions it was originally built for. It then started getting 'mainstream' attention.
ARPANET was opened up to commercial use in 1993, which is with-in ten years from TCP/IP go-live: again with-in 14 years.
You talk about it as if there's a well-worn path that every viable technology must follow to succeed. Cue discussions about the first automobiles, the internet, the smart phone, etc. But history rhymes, it doesn't repeat. The internet's rise itself is a unique phenomenon. I'm more concerned with dealing with blockchains as a reality, not deciding whether or not they're actually happening. In my experience, almost every "nothing is happening, y'all are crazy" argument in the past 10 years has revealed itself to be toxic coping. Who does this denial actually help? So far, Western society is collapsing, finance is getting more centralized, global warming is coming along just fine, corporations are making decisions for us, and the internet is getting more and more totalitarian. All good?
Don't be surprised when the infrastructure magically appears and every asset you own is indexed and tracked on a blockchain. Oops! This is really not the time to be talking shit about cryptocurrencies as a concept, because they're going to be part of your life whether you like it or not. What you should be focusing on is helping shape them in your favor - because they're currently not.
So, let's assume it is, in fact, happening. The technology should also enable certain services which weren't possible before, but I'm not sure what those are. We see the corpos going into the "metaverse", and central banks going for CBDCs, which I suppose could work (for them), but if there was a pro-consumer service that can be deployed now it'd end discussions like this.
There goes the decentralization.
Speak for yourself.
Difference is the things you listed are free services that had massive marketing budgets.
Bitcoin has zero marketing budget, grew from 0 organically, and adoption requires converting a percentage of your networth, which is a major ask. For this and many other technical/educational reasons the barrier to entry is much higher which makes this a bad comparison.
Though I could similarly throw in dissidents earning money and financing. I could just repeat what's in the article.
In the mean time, sure, it would be smart to find other use cases.
The combination of PayPal and Gold doesn't seem to justify to me the valuation of a market cap of 800 billion dollars or in other words, a daily budget of 40 million dollars for securing the blockchain.
Unless you're...Ed Snowden?
Or Paypal takes a dislike to you for their own reasons?
etc
It's hard not to see the massive influence of Scott Alexander in the way Vitalik presents his ideas and structures his essay. One SSC meme that kept coming up in my mind as I read the essay is that "ideas are soldiers" [1] is certainly in play with the blockchain wars. It's refreshing to see we have leaders in this space that can recognize the bravery of the enemy's soldiers. At least for today!
I sincerely understand Bitcoin maximalism now better than I have before.
The Mimblewimble protocol [0] bucks that trend, providing more privacy at the base layer while being less expensive in terms of the historical size of transactions [1].
> a focus on simplicity and deep mathematical purity: a 1 MB block size, a 21 million coin limit
A supply of 50/(2^{height/210000}) coins every 10 minutes is not particularly simple or pure. One coin per second forever seems preferable, even if it takes a century to get inflation down to 1% [2].
> The protocol design must be easy to justify decades and centuries down the line; the technology and parameter choices must be a work of art.
This is where Ethereum fails miserably.
> The second ingredient is the culture of uncompromising, steadfast minimalism.
Even bitcoin is not that minimal if you consider the complexities of bitcoin script. Much of that functionality can be achieved with scriptless scripts [3].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190312100102/https://www.circl...
[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart
[2] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
[3] https://medium.com/scalar-capital/scriptless-scripts-25e18fd...
Ethereum failed already at beginning. A blockchain; Mutable ,premined and ICO is already there. Eth is the target for regulations and censorship sooner or later. And i agree with that scalability is very important part of decentralization. Privacy and scalability well balanced in MimbleWimble.
90% of the creations on Ethereum are useless and there is little there that is worth looking at. From the start, it was not designed to scale at all hence its sluggish throughput and high fees. Now it is going to become even more centralized when it moves to PoS.
Might as well drop the decentralization claims then.
Sounds like early internet BBS boards!
RE: ETH decentralization, they've prioritized decentralization of the settlement layer over the decentralization of money in the world, which does somewhat reflect the current state of the world.
Same for Bitcoin — but it'll never happen.
Given it's April Fools day, I think this may be GPT-3 trained on crypto subreddits and rationalist blogs.
If you want to be fully sovereign with your wealth, you have to accept full responsibility of that wealth. If that is not a responsibility you want bc you believe it is too risky, then do not buy bitcoin.
Or, you can trust centralized authority (a bank) with that responsibility; obviously, the trade off is you lose full control of your wealth.
Additionally, how you approach ownership of your wealth is not binary. Nothing is stopping you from putting some proportion of each in either bank or bitcoin.
The question worth asking is about how controlling your own wealth, but having to trust the value of it to a giant swath of people over which no one entity has any significant control, compares to not having any control of your own wealth, AND having the value of any wealth you do have dependent entirely on the will of some unelected bureaucrat.
Is it not totally obvious that bitcoin has market value?
If not, consider these points - bitcoin was not created by MIT and Uchicago STEM and econ PhDs, it was born out of an anonymous internet "white paper." It proved itself as a type of "money" in the internet dark markets, and continues to do so. It wasn't "lab tested," it was tested in the real world. When China banned crypto, the price of bitcoin did not crash. Only authoritarian countries have banned it, while some US lawmakers hold bitcoin and Gensler (chairmen of the SEC) taught a class at MIT about crypto.
These should be very compelling aspects of bitcoin.
How do you know?
If bitcoin existed before the Civil Rights movement in the US, it would not have helped people of color spend their money in "whites only" establishments or buy houses in white neighborhoods when (prior to 1948) a covenant could legally exclude a person of color from owning certain homes. And after 1948 the legal system could still be weaponized against such purchases, or if all else failed the buyer harassed or worse.
These are more extreme examples, but that sort of thing does still go on in places both in the US and elsewhere. Bitcoin or other crypto fall short of solving monetary censorship.
Separately, why does it matter where bitcoin was created? (especially given that we really don't know who created it anyway).
Arguments about sovereignty and control are all ultimately specious, as they depend on a global infrastructure paid for by “fiat” dollars to exist. Your “sovereignty” over a random number is meaningless without the network that facilitates its transfer.
To date, crypto has proven to be a uniquely awful store of wealth. It was initially a magical way to transfer value cheaply, but the growth of it got rid of the “cheap” part.
This is a striking claim about the asset class that has gone up in value more than any other in the years since its creation.
It's a highly speculative investment at best, and a pyramid scheme at worst.
On how many of those occasions was there no opportunity, within say 3-12 months, to sell for higher afterward?
and if you don't have the answer to this...
Many with cryptocurrency haven't had to do any hard honest work to obtain it, e.g. the early joiners who have just had to wait as their "wealth" accrues from later joiners, or even newer joiners who have made their "wealth" from scams or rugpulls or wash trading to artificially inflate the value of their NFTs or whatever. These people tend not to value their "wealth" in the same way as the "greater fools" who have had to work hard at honest jobs to earn their fiat prior to converting it to cryptocurrency, and so don't have such a problem with the constant risk of losing everything via loss or theft or market crash or whatever.
I don't think this is any more a fact than my statement. I'm merely trying to point out that you seem to be saying it's ok to invest in what people perceive as a scam (my example was pyramid schemes) because it's an investment.
Literally the only way you can profit with stocks is if people keep buying in at higher prices. It's the perfect instantiation of a pyramid scheme.
Except, of course, if you live in it, rent it out or use it as businesses asset. Good luck doing that with crypto.
> Literally the only way you can profit with stocks is if people keep buying in at higher prices. It's the perfect instantiation of a pyramid scheme.
Except, of course, that you as a shareholder can influence the direction of the company and earn dividends. Good luck doing that with crypto.
- Real estate has real-world use cases
- Stocks have real-world use cases
- Bitcoin has real-world use cases
It's meaningless to describe any of these as pyramid schemes because "to profit you must be able to sell at a higher price to someone else". That's true of buying or selling anything.
There are people using Bitcoin as a currency, via lightning, right now. More join all the time. The network expands.
It is a currency, is used as a currency, as sats. It is also a long term store of value as Bitcoin. You can ignore reality as much as your like, but the world has moved on from your 2017 era complaints.
It is wildly practical today, and there are several good custodial solutions if you do not wish to run a node yourself. Please give it a try!
I'm afraid your comment doesn't make much sense.
I recommend not storing your password with your coke.
How does that differ from other commodities trading? The only way to profit in the futures market is to buy low and sell high, too, for instance.
It doesn’t. Trading is zero sum. It supports the extraction, processing and delivery of useful things, however, which is positive sum.
Trading between financial participants is, cetiris paribus, always zero sum. Irrespective of the timeline.
Buyer's gains are the seller's opportunity cost; buyer's losses were avoided by the seller. (Paribus violation is when parties have different funding costs.)
Moving commodities around isn't trading per se; it's logistics. Again, value adding.
Only if you consider the trade in the quantity of the goods traded, and not in a prevailing unit of accounting.
Nope, this is microeconomics. If you and I have the same funding costs and we trade a commodity derivative, any gain you have is a gain I gave up. Any loss you have is one I avoided.
This is true irrespective of the unit of account of point in time at which one measures it; it's an identity. The only
Someone who buys wheat, holds it and sells it the next day is definitely not “trading”, he merely engages in a series of discrete trades? Daft.
The "and use" phrase is what differentiates commodities from cryptocurrency.
They’re both inherently high risk, but the value derives from different things. With small caps, it’s the idea that one or more may grow to produce outsize returns in the future, whereas the other is hoping someone will come along later with more money to take you out of your position.
(The small caps for the most part aren’t attracting money based on popularity or memes, so are closer to high-risk investing than gambling on speculative assets).
An investor in that situation has to (presumably, and I'm ignorant so maybe not) do work in doing research, having enough domain and industry knowledge to evaluate what a "winner" looks like in a given industry, understand how valuations are formed and what can make them wrong, etc etc.
Some of that is done by crypto people sure, but the difference between a big success and losing your money there seems a lot more luck-based than in normal investing.
People have been making the argument that investing is gambling for decades at this point, and I don't think that's completely wrong but it is very hard to draw the line. I am comfortable putting crypto trading on the gambling side of that line, and most forms of professional investing probably on the non-gambling side.
They are possibly a lot closer than I think they are, but I don't think that speaks well for either activity!
With cryptocurrency it is the same. The combination of zero consumer protection and anonymity is the perfect breeding ground for fraud. If you were being charitable, you could call converting fiat money into cryptocurrency a gamble, but certainly not a sound investment. The only people who will try to convince you otherwise are those set to gain from the fraud.
How you become sure you have as much information about the subject as the person you're dealing with (i.e., whether that's because it is required by law and you expect to have some recourse if it's violated, or because you are confident that you've had access to the relevant information for some other reason) isn't really important.
It isn't difficult to set up multisignature wallets, where you can lose some subset of the keys and still retain access to the funds. (It's not easy either, but it's not difficult, and there are companies like Casa and Unchained making it easier.)
Just like someone might keep a couple hundred dollars in their wallet/on their person, a couple percent of their wealth in a home safe, and the majority of their wealth distributed across multiple locations with various failsafes to access it, someone might keep a couple hundred bucks worth of BTC in a wallet on their phone, another percent or two of their BTC in a single-sig hardware wallet in a safe at home, and the majority of their BTC in a 3-of-5 multisig setup with only two keys at home, one in a safety deposit box, one in a trusted family member's home, and one in the custody of their attorney.
I don't think setting up the wallet is the hardest part. The hardest part would be to get into a legally binding agreement with the other parties, that you depend on from now on to access your "wealth", the very situation that crypto-currencies were supposed to avert.
You can make sure they don't have enough of the keys to move your funds without your consent. Making a legally binding agreement that they have to give you access to the key they have if/when you demand it is no more complex a legal task than any other instance where you trust someone to custody something for you.
I never said it was harder. I'm merely pointing out that the proposed solution to this particular usability issue that crypto-currencies suffer from involves reverting back to a web of mutual obligations enforced by courts of justice, which entirely defeats the purpose of using a crypto-currency.
Worldwide, the percentage is similar.
Of course being unbanked isn’t equivalent but it’s likely very nearly so.
Not to mention, the chances of being unbanked are higher for vulnerable populations, especially those who might benefit from uncensorable money.
The last transaction fee I paid was 33¢, and the average transaction in the last Bitcoin block was 913 bytes, so your internet access speed isn't an obstacle to sending a transaction as long as it's above about 20 bits per second; if you want to run a full node you need at least 17000 bits per second of internet access unless you're using the Blockstream satellite.
Typically I pay US$5 a month for cellphone internet access when I have it, but more commonly I use Wi-Fi in various places.
The fact is that many people hold their wealth in cash, and many of the same people are part of vulnerable populations.
One shouldn’t remove another’s alternatives simply because it’s assumed that the other lacks access or sophistication. Even if true, both potential deficiencies are fully reparable and do not permanently negate the benefits of uncensorable money.
Centralized internet is not long for this world. The Internet is being fractured, both ideologically and physically, right now, by world war.
This only gets worse before it gets better, which probably means mesh networks will be adopted soon enough. Anyway,
This is why adopting distribution of responsibilities is so important in projects like Ethereum — your offline handhelds will be able to make provable transactions without having immediate communication with every star in the constellation, so to speak.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-31/ukraine-s...
Future developments like covenants (restricting future spending of a coin) will create even more secure storage, systems that allow you to claw back stolen funds using backup keys for example.
Doesn't that remove the trust in the transaction? Isn't the one of the promised joys of these things that, short of a fork, the transaction is immutable and that people don't have to worry about fraud in the form of charge backs or their money disappearing once they have it?
If you know the mechanism for potential reversal of the transaction and trust the process responsible for making the decision about when to reverse a transaction, you've known the rules and the context from the start.
It would have to be a well-designed process to earn your trust, but it's not an unsolvable problem.
To my knowledge, there aren't any smart contracts that have implemented such a system really well yet, but I might just not have heard about them, or they may just not have been tried yet.
At least in this system, you could have whole services that build a track record based on publicly identifiable information. You can't flood them with reviews to skew the results because you can cryptographically verify whether the reviewer was party to the disputed transaction.
There are a thousand theoretical variants on the same basic idea, but it's at least no worse than the existing system.
A) huge amount of research
B) huge amount of risk / personal responsibility
C) and Still trust some or multiple 3rd party services to practically obtain or withdraw bitcoin, which have same or more power or likelihood to cut me off
I (think) understand the dream. I don't see the reality of seamlessly easily practically safely cheaply transacting bitcoin. As a mediocre techie, every time I ponder getting some bitcoin for giggle, I get lost in conolex how tos and run screaming away from complexity and risk.
Or five different parties you trust.
I don't pretend to know whether Vitalik's theory is true, but it certainly seems plausible. And defending linux from bad actors is a herculean task. If Torvald's toxicity helped him in that endeavor, his apology would be a negative development.
Interestingly, the Rust community has had incredible success being explicitly anti-toxic. It's a wonderful community that I enjoy. Rust is also now reaching a level importance that it will be a target to be coopted as described by Vitalik, as prominent members of the Rust community have expressed concern over [0].
[0] https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1437441118745071617
That is not at all original to Vitalik. It pre-exists in the bitcoin community and maybe is even older than that.
They're wrong. The future is smart contracts, and moving off blockchains in favor of other distributed systems. Blockchains is what's holding the entire space back.
These are the three things that need to be done to make crypto go mainstream: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf
Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum.
May you never personally experience being unbanked or otherwise financially oppressed.
> May you never personally experience being unbanked or otherwise financially oppressed.
Of course. But this is unrelated, unless you're making the "politician's fallacy": "We must do something (about that). This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
The hope of people who believe in a future switch to crypto as the monetary standard are hoping the technology is strong enough to withstand enforcement of laws against it, hoping that all the laws in the world won't be able to stop it.
Whether that happens remains to be seen, but it's important to understand that this is part of the hope and the goal.
A policy ban is also an implicit admission that the government's position on money and finance is weak - if the US bans bitcoin, that implies that the dollar can't compete against bitcoin on its own merit, without the enforcement of violence.
Every country with capital controls already does this.
Most of them (e.g. Egypt, Iraq, Bangladesh and China) hand banned or heavily restricted (e.g. India) crypto. The same way they restrict hard currencies. America has an open capital account, so the threat is less present.
> Both sides of the Bitcoin network would carry on working (although if there was an unequal divide, one side might be slowed so much that it became unusable). Let’s imagine this carried on for a few days or weeks before connections were properly restored. At this point we would have two divergent “branches” of the blockchain, which is not allowed. By design, there is no way to merge the branches, and Bitcoin will simply pick whichever of the two branches happens to be the longest. For the unlucky half, all transactions that happened during those days or weeks of network partition would be erased.
A better analogy - tech improves the hammer, it does not have to re-invent it. Example: open your phone and marvel at how easily you can send and receive funds from you banking app; 10+ years ago, you would have to go to a bank to do that.
> I would trust Google, Apple, and many other tech companies with my money.
When I have a problem and need to call my bank I can usually get an actual person or even go to a branch where I can annoy someone in person, where as Google acts like categorically opposed to support even to people paying or making them money.
That doesn't happen as easily on the blockchain.
You are fully in control of your funds with cryptocurrency. There is no middleman that can say "no, sorry, you can't use your money today."
Don't blockchains rely entirely on transaction processors, i.e. middlemen, to process transactions?
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/after-chinas-crypto-ban-who...
Personally I don't much care for free phone therapy. I think you get what you pay for.
I've been doing 100% online/mail banking for >20 years. I've never actually set foot inside a bank that I was a routine customer of.
its like talking to a kid vs talking to a grown-up, to put it in terms you might better be able to grok
I’m not saying there aren’t major improvements to be made in fintech, but I think by and large crypto is trying to improve parts of finance that are not actually improved by technology.
The idea that crypto is "out of reach" of governments, regulators, law and oppressive regimes is one of the fairy tales that crypto pundits believe that is simply not true.
In a country that is unbanked and financially oppressed, even if you were loaded with BTC, and even if all your suppliers of food, housing, energy, clothing, schooling etc were somehow setup to transact in BTC, no-one explains how they'll just "bypass" the financial system, tax system, government regulators or the people with guns. There is a naive certainty that people can "sidestep" the formal system and no-one will ever come knocking. In unbanked, oppressed countries? This fairy tale that the "system" will just keep working but the "nasty government" will throw its hands up and go "YOLO BTC what are you gonna do lol carry on everyone". Please. It's the easiest thing in the world to pass laws outlawing this stuff, and then lean on infrastructure, network providers, suppliers, etc etc..
Nevermind the transaction fees that make this untenable anyway. Perhaps the poor oppressed can just write everything down on paper to settle accounts at the end of the month/quarter/year/never and dodge tx fees. Of course, L2 networks, problem solved.
Anyway. I suppose BTC growth has to come from somewhere. So why not exploit the global south further under the aegis of yet another colonial missionary expedition to save them from themselves. This may make life worse in the end for the savages but hey, a bunch of us will get richer.
Here's one explanation - when the people with guns realize they are paid in a fiat currency that their bosses keep inflating for their own benefit, what do you think they will do?
Another - who will the people with guns shoot at when they can't identify an anonymous crypto wallet?
Same thing that happens in Venezuela. You pay your army in real assets and hard currency.
> who will the people with guns shoot at when they can't identify an anonymous crypto wallet?
Which is a false assumption, given recent history.
Venezuela proves my point - it's a borderline failed state where the government is very, very fragile.
> Which is a false assumption, given recent history.
You may be referring to the Colonial Pipeline hackers. When hackers implement strong crypto opsec, it is impossible to catch them.[1] Dumb and careless criminals get caught all the time, there are a lot more that don't.
[1] Use wasabi or samourai for coinjoins. Run a full node. Use a wallet with coin control and labelling. Buy from Bisq. Or use Monero.
Take out the word "crypto" and this statement is equally true. Law enforcement probably won't catch a criminal with good opsec whether they're using cash or Bitcoin or bags of cocaine.
So when the government is bad people who have guns, it might be tempting to think “There is no mitigation for this because they have guns! They can just exert infinite leverage at any point to squelch any mitigation to their corruption!”
But reality is there are only so many bad guys with guns and they can’t be everywhere all the time. Every additional tool people have to circumvent corruption helps.
Can they access the internet and read content from free countries? Educate themselves? It helps. Even if it invites persecution, it helps.
Can they access some way of storing value their corrupt leaders can’t just steal or print away? It helps. Sure someone can come to the door with a gun and demand your wallet key, but until then, it helps.
An obscure cryptocurrency black market is the only one that can really exist for any length of time. However, an obscure crypto ecosystem is also one that is difficult to actually use. It doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you've hidden from the government, if you can't actually spend it on anything.
The concept you seem to be reaching for is "black market".
the system doesn't have to be perfect and you don't have to be 100% invested for it to work, you can still be helped by crypto in a financially oppressed country even if you don't use it for everyday transactions, even if you don't use for all your money, even if you use it once per year.
like any other options, you use the best one for each situation, and crypto fills a huge gap here, fees included.
We've already agreed on our dominant L1s.
What happens when we've agreed on our dominant L2(s)?
Say, with the UX help of a large corporate entity with financial interest in actually helping their consumer remain financially secure?
My experience with poverty in the US, having both experienced it myself and continuing to associate with many people experiencing it now, is that the main issue faced by poor people is having money, not having access to the money they do have.
Even for the "unbanked" or people who use high fee check cashing and similar products, that is largely a way to avoid unpredictable fees charged by banks, or simply because banks aren't willing to provide the services they need unbundled from other services you need more resources to access.
Plus the neobanks have really changed these dynamics in the last 5 or so years. If you're still working off pre-2018 conceptions of what the intersections of poverty and banking look like that can steer you way wrong here.
But anyway these are policy choices and we could make them different if we decided to. A complex technical solution is a poor first choice for solving this problem.
Here is where you go in the wrong direction. It's not about poor people in a stable country, it's about rich people in an unstable country. So the use-case is actually the complete opposite.
I don't think knowledge that broad is possible and so it's largely a rhetorical move ("WHAT SO YOU HATE THE POOR & OPPRESSED??"). I have firsthand knowledge of at least one group in this category that isn't helped by this technology so I shared it.
The needs of the rich anywhere aren't an interest of mine so I don't know what their use case is. My point is that there are many use cases, and if you're going to assert one you should be specific about who it applies to.
People with very little money are not going to put it into "some phone app", as they will see it.
I've heard this idea that cryptocurrency is going to help people in poor countries for almost ten years. At this point, absent even one concrete example, I'm comfortable calling it a falsehood.
Trying to guilt us into liking your Dunning-Krugerands by implying we are somehow unsympathetic to the plight of the poor is not very nice. Please stop doing that.
Not for me. Why would an asset, which I can lose, have no direct control over it or even better, whose storage places are hacked on a weekly basis, earn my trust? And no, I am not even starting about the energy waste most crypto-assets are.
My money right now is (mostly) not a physical possession either. It exists as a non-blockchain ledger entry in bank's computer system, and cannot be lost as easily as crypto currency, even if I make a mistake like forgetting my password.
The difference is, you can also self-custody your Bitcoin. Obviously what's in your custody is just a private key; but for all intents and purposes that is self-custody. You are the sole person in control of those coins.
So Bitcoin gives you the choice of how you want to store it. Traditional money does not give you that choice. At a certain point there are physical and practical limits to how much cash you can self-custody (not to mention transport or transfer from one place or person to another).
But I take your meaning and it's a valid point: crypto self storage scales better than traditional cash. If scaling of that sort was an issue for me and self-storage a critical feature I wanted then crypto would fill the need. For the moment I'd still avoid using it for that purpose: I don't consider any coin truly stable at the moment, and if a new one came along tomorrow that appeared to have a rock solid foundation then I'd still want to see a few years of history before trusting it's stability. USDC might come close, but can you have self-custody of it, or trade it outside of the Coinbase ecosystem?
How many Canadians are now rethinking that decision after the government banned people from using their own money if they supported a cause the rulers found objectionable? It's not everyone, certainly, but it's also not no one.
Banks are safe until they aren't. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere they are, for now, great! Enjoy that while it lasts.
But recognize that it isn't true everywhere, and it isn't necessarily true always even where it's true presently. Just because it's a reasonable thing for you to do right now, that doesn't make it a reasonable thing for all or even most people to do now, much less indefinitely.