If you live in a country with an unstable currency but without strong capital controls, the upside can be had by holding dollars. And that comes without the risk that your known-to-be-a-bit-dodgy nearly-dollar collapses.
If you want to buy crypto using rubles, Lebanese pounds, Venezuelan bolivars or anything else, you need a counterparty who will accept that currency as payment. And if your currency is losing a lot of its value every day, with no end in sight, your counterparty will not give you anything approximating the official exchange rate, even on an open market, because accepting payment in that currency immediately exposes them to that currency's inflation.
Unless your bank kicks you out by some reason (incompetent compliance). Unless foreign bank refuses your transaction because the bank doesn’t like the color of your passport. Unless somehow banking system wants to cut extra from your transaction (2.5-4% for transaction) because of double currency conversion you didn’t ask for, because you didn’t specify correct correspondent bank and your bank didn’t tell you about that.
All that happened.
These are all problems invented by Crypto bulls to build a narrative for why Crypto is widely useful.
There are a handful of small, very poor countries where Crypto might have been better than holding local currency. But you also had to be poor in those poor countries for it to make sense for you to buy Crypto instead of hard assets like land or housing - if you were merely interested in bypassing monetary devaluation - and not interested in EXTEMELY risky speculation to get absurd returns.
The total money for people this might even have made a little bit of sense for is maybe $1Bn. Considering Crypto had close to a $3T market cap at some point - this is not a talking point. It's noise.
The real story - and the only story - is that Crypto is and always has been speculation.
These problems happened to me and still happening. Swift transactions in USD from US to UAE are getting double converted (at cost of 2.5-4% of the total amount) and it’s very difficult to get meaningful answer from the bank support about what’s happening
These are real things that have happened, although they're not very widespread. The question is whether using a risky system with no safety net is better than risking this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/current-account...
2. Stable coins make no sense for anyone who has meaningful wealth even in those countries because they have other, better options available.
3. The amount of money in Stable coins is >$100Bn - this is far more than what would go in to resolve any of these problems. Mentioning these problems is noise / a distraction.
4. The primary purpose of stable coins is for people to get in and out of / time trades in cryptocurrency (speculation).
Do you honestly believe people collectively parked >$80Bn in a shady company using it purely as a bank account - because that was really their best option? If not - then these talking points aren't really worth talking about. My whole point.
There are many downsides to Tether. Why is it worth the risk in comparison?
Additionally, there's simply not enough money in Tether compared to the $80B to talk about. It's a distraction.
For instance, most devs I know that work remote jobs for companies abroad, they ask for them to pay in crypto because if you try to get paid in the legal way you get 50% less off the bat in the forceful conversion from usd to pesos and then you get an additional 20-30% less due to taxes