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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Argentina but live in the UK: in 2020 my mom needed an urgent oncological treatment and the only method I had to transfer the money was using a cryptocurrency. I really don't like to talk about this stuff but when people here in HN keep making arguments like "oh who needs this stuff, I can send money to my friends with the Monzo app" it really makes me feel like my problems as someone from the third world don't matter at all

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I think most people here agree that it is unnecessarily hard and expensive to transfer money between countries. However cryptocurrency is a technological solution to a regulatory problem. This issue could be solved tomorrow by legislation if governments would cooperate and work to do so. All the efforts pushing cryptocurrency for this particular niche would be better served pushing for international standards for cheap and simple instant money transfers.

> All the efforts pushing cryptocurrency for this particular niche would be better served pushing for international standards for cheap and simple instant money transfers.

That seems impossible given today's geopolitics. Crypto remittance at least works.

Maybe that is true of transferring money between USA and Russia, or between USA and the EU, or the USA and any other country outside of Canada and Mexico, but there is no reason that the UK and Argentina don’t have a bilateral agreement in place that would make transferring money between the two countries quick, cheap, and easy.

>there is no reason that the UK and Argentina don’t have a bilateral agreement in place that would make transferring money between the two countries quick, cheap, and easy.

This may be true but the fact is there is no such agreement and therefore the friction remains. Crypto at least provides a universal low friction option to everyone with no need for disinterested political groups to spend precious time to take action.

>This issue could be solved tomorrow by legislation if governments would cooperate and work to do so.

Again, many countries around the globe don't have a functional government capable of produce such legislation _tomorrow_.

GP was talking about Argentina and the UK. Both have pretty functioning governments, and pretty stable relation. This could easily be solved for most people today. Even China and India have stable governments that pass legislation and adopt international standards. You will only find exceptions in places like the USA, Iran and Russia. However most people don’t live there.

I'm quite tired for a proper response right now but I wanted to point out that this has nothing to do with UK-Argentina bilateral relations: Argentina's economy has a very complex history, specially during the past 20 years, and things that you give for granted like transferring money internationally with your bank or having a savings account are simply not an option.

And, just as importantly, once the regulation in the companies catches up, cryptocurrency will be subject to it, too.

It will either become just as slow as the accursèd centralized fiat currencies, or it will be outright banned.

Any regulatory hurdles that cryptocurrency allows you to avoid for now, it won't for long. It is not, and cannot be, a long-term solution.

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