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Comment by MathYouF | Hacker News Reader

I thought Miami became the hub of decentralized finance because Miami is the defacto port of entry for wealthy people from Latin America, and some (small but influential) percentage of those wealthy are trying to covertly extract their wealth from their home country into the U.S. (why they need to extract it covertly could be because they gained it through narcotic activity, or just plain old government corruption), and crypto is the defacto medium of exchange for those wishing to anonymously move illicitly gained funds worldwide.

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> wealthy people from Latin America

Yes, there is that. Those people tend to purchase property since there are fewer currency controls on it. And you can get a visa (EB-1,EB-2, etc) out of it for you and the family. Those families are still wealthy in their own countries but the Miami property shell game is a hedge.

The decentralized finance hub has very little to do with Latin America. And LATAM is very rarely brought up when it comes to DeFi. It can definitely work there but most still to send remittances by Western Union to family back home. Miami is just a formerly inexpensive city with great weather with a strong libertarian streak. It's still overwhelmingly a playground for the VCs. It does not have the strong engineering culture of SV, NYC, or Boston, but it wants to. And the city is going out of its way to be overtly friendly to crypto startups and financiers thinking if you build it they will come. The jury is still out on the later. It's still 50/50 on people staying here long term or realizing they missed their old home.

Very interesting, thanks for clearing up my conceptions on this. I'd become quite familiar with the massive remittance use case of blockchain in Latin American countries with inflationary currencies and/or currency controls (Venezuela, Argentina) and assumed that Miami had adopted crypto in part because of how many inbound Latin Americans already used it as a medium of exchange.

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