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Comment by throw1234651234 | Hacker News Reader

Yea, except compare the ease, cost, and time of bank wiring your family $5000 to get out of a country where a war started and sending BTC. Something crypto nay-sayers conveniently ignore.

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And the crypto bros conveniently ignore that you can’t easily exchange your BTC for actual cash to buy real things without an exchange or a bank account.

Except for conveniently using one of the ~40,000 crytpo ATMs that are already installed globally.

https://coinatmradar.com/

40,000 is a microscopic number and 95% of them are in USA and Canada.

The countries that could make most use of these crypto ATMs have no access to them.

El Salvador has more than 2000 of them. If people want to cash out BTC, they can. No network access or exchange needed.

https://coinatmradar.com/country/64/bitcoin-atm-el-salvador/

How much do they charge for this service? How quickly do they perform the transaction vs. a typical ATM?

A lot! I tried them a couple of times just for fun, the exchange rates were horrible.

Is that actually realistic? I clicked through Ukraine and couldn't find an ATM to sell BTC. Crypto requires the same assumptions of stability once you want to turn it into something real.

You are not wiring $5000, you adding a new event to a globally-replicated Event Store database, while other people and entities are speculating on theses events using real money, money surrogates, and/or electricity.

Sending 15K within the EU is free - https://brussels-express.eu/bank-transfers-will-immediate-fr...

Sending with Wise over multiple currencies is going to be much cheaper than sending currency to currency over BTC...

Banks are also safer and covered against fraud. Eg. the other article about Coinbase and it's depositors today.

Multiple things crypto "yes-claimers" ignore. But yeah, they "like" the volatility. Except when it drops ofc.

Exactly. I understand the value of the Blockchain, as a distributed, albeit inefficient, ledger of transactions that are anonymous and hard to destroy.

But here we have a country, millions of peoples hard work and assets being converted to bitcoin. How exactly does demonstrate critical thinking, planning or heck, even a plan?

Monero is better for that, and the price hasn't crashed

1 BTC = 1 BTC, so how long does it take to convert it to $5000?

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