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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> I have yet to buy a single thing, let alone a single useful thing, with a cryptocurrency.

Literally million in Turkey, Nigeria, Argentina and other middle income, without access to traditional dollarized banking, use stablecoins to protect their savings from being decimated by rampant local inflation.

I don't possibly see how anyone could argue that isn't a "useful product" uniquely powered by crypto.

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This is the first time I've heard compelling use of cryoto-coins, and it's actually a _great_ one.

So many life-savings have been completely lost due to political effups, it makes me happy to see some way for people to safe-guard against inept governments.

One question I have though (I don't know much about crypto stuff), is how stable these "stablecoins" are, and how? Is it easy to trade back to real money?

It depends which stablecoin. USDT and USDC are both billion dollar coins backed by enough real assets that they survived the collapse and "run on the bank" of the failed stablecoin Terra.

It's super easy to trade either of them for dollars.

Access to banking is limited by the countries governments. If the governments want to make buying US dollars illegal they can make buying stable coins backed by dollars illegal too. Sure it’s a quick way to do forex currency trading, but that is available on the internet already and these coins require access to the internet to be bought and sold as well. They take the same risk that their “dollars” or rather these tokens that represent dollars could be taken from them by their government’s enforcement.

hm last time i checked, in Turkey you can trivially buy dollars and any other currency your heart desires. Are you sure about that country having no access to traditional dollarized banking?

But doesn’t every other asset perform that same function? Precious metals or any other foreign currency, for instance?

also, even if that was true for all of those presumably unbanked countries, how is allowing universal access to stable stablecoins any easier? still need some physical place to cash out, so what's the difference between that and a bank? unless you envision completely tearing down local currencies and going fully digital wallet to wallet?

Almost all major cities in middle income countries have currency brokers who are more than happy to earn spreads by making a market between on-chain dollar-based stablecoins and the local currency. It's not really any different than traditional forex brokers. If anything, slightly easier because each physical location doesn't have to manage an individual cash vault.

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