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Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the "8 million adults — who made online payments to friends or family in other countries used at least one kind of cryptocurrency" would agree with you. [0]

[0] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...

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This woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations article says nothing like what you are asserting it says.

Umm ... that was an exact quote from the article.

I think most people are rightfully skeptical of survey results where survey methodology is not disclosed.

Their disclosed survey methodology:

"The Cross-Border Remittances Report, a PYMNTS and Stellar Development Foundation collaboration, draws from a census-balanced survey of 2,079 U.S. consumers who made cross-border peer-to-peer payments, conducted between June 23 and July 12, 2021. Respondents were an average of 39 years old, and 41 percent were female. Also, 47 percent held college degrees and 48 percent earned more than $100,000 in annual income." [0]

[0] https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro... (Page 25)

EDIT: BTW I have absolutely no affiliation with either PYMNTS or the Stellar Development Foundation.

There you go.

Not only crypto-skeptics can't be bothered to do basic research and even finish reading the entire PYMNTS article and click the 'Download report' link at the end of the article to see and verify the citations and methodology for themselves, instead they continue to pull out anecdotes, assumptions and at worse fallacies to deny reports like this one because 'all crypto bad', or 'all blockchain bad' nonsense. The decades of denial and ignorance from them is beyond pathetic.

What I am seeing here overall in this thread is a very extreme anti-crypto reaction, because the most vocal of all critics have lots books to sell them and they are certainly on a mission to totally stop all of crypto, blockchain and NFTs.

Good luck with that.

I read the whole thing, including the survey results summary, but nowhere do I see how a survey of 2,000 of their own subscribers can be magnified to “represent” three million people. That methodology is not mentioned anywhere that I can see. And while I am definitely not a statistician this seems like massaging the numbers to an extraordinary degree.

I certainly have no doubt that a portion of the 2,000 people surveyed, that are very-likely already interested in cryptocurrency, use cryptocurrency for cross-border transactions as they say they do. But that’s all the survey shows absent an explained methodology for extrapolating larger numbers from their pool.

Edit: clarity.

Whatever the audited data might be, there is a significant population of people in many countries around the world using crypto as a currency, not as an investment. At the end of the day, that may be its true value/demand. I have no doubt that regulators will do their best to make that more and more difficult, but the net effect of that seems to only enhance its value as a currency.

I would not call the "survey of 2,079 respondents" by Stellar Development Foundation [0] "woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations".

[0] https://www.stellar.org/

Your provided link does not take me to any kind of survey results.

Regardless, I think it's safe to assume the Stellar Foundation polled their own users, and not a representative sample of the general population. "Cryptocurrency enthusiasts use cryptocurrency" is not exactly an interesting or surprising survey result.

The link includes an invitation to download the report leading to these survey results:

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro...

The survey results I saw, the important citations I didn’t see is how they extrapolated the results to represent anything more than the responses of 2,079 people that are interested in surveys about cryptocurrency and cross-border transactions. Therein lies the rub.

So what does this have to do with 8 million people?

If the survey was of 2,079 people, then how does this extrapolate to 8 million? They say 23% of the respondents represent 8 million people, but that does not mean that 8 million people actually used crypto.

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