May you never personally experience being unbanked or otherwise financially oppressed.
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?
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 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.
> 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."
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.