Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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Ah yes here comes the privilege argument to derail legitimate discourse. You love to see it.

Your first approach should be a Wise multi-currency account.

Where Wise doesn't work the only thing that makes any sense are stablecoins from a proper issuer, like USDC (definitely not USDT). These are of course issued and controlled by centralized entities, making them antithetical to the very principles of crypto. They may as well be private scrip CBDCs.

Any decentralized/floating-rate coins are utter garbage for folks without access to meaningful banking systems in so-called third-world countries due to the volatility, embedded systemic leverage, high fees and potential long transaction times. These folks are the least able to stomach the 90% drawdowns (and 100% rug-pulls) we've seen market-wide. Frankly, I think the Turkish Lira has outperformed every major cryptocurrency for the last year.

What these people need are actual privacy-preserving CBDCs, of which there are exactly zero in the market.

Please put away the faux privilege defense. Folks of any level of privilege are able to comment meaningfully on the fitness of a technical system for purpose. Allow their arguments to stand on their own merits.

Although I agree that the expression that OP made maybe wasn't the best, they do have a point.

> Your first approach should be a Wise multi-currency account.

Excellent example; Wise is not available for account setup in the vast majority of developing countries, so if that's your solution it's already a failure. But why? For the most part it seems to come down to banking and currency regulations, which is exactly what cryptocurrency (at least Bitcoin) was designed to circumvent. I'm not even talking about countries that are essentially kleptocracies and have moulded their regulations to fit that structure, or remittances that have become such a large industry they practically power the GDP of a number of extremely poor countries.

> Any decentralized/floating-rate coins are utter garbage for folks without access to meaningful banking systems in so-called third-world countries due to the volatility, embedded systemic leverage, high fees and potential long transaction times.

I'm not sure this argument still holds with all the defi options today, but if this is an improvement on the status quo I guarantee people in third world countries will use it in spite of its deficiencies. A central bank that throttles access to alternative currency options will practically shut down the use of existing banking infrastructure, whether it's good or not.

> Wise is not available for account setup in the vast majority of developing countries, so if that's your solution it's already a failure.

Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I can find is this list of countries where it isn't allowed [0], which includes several developing countries but certainly not the vast majority of them.

[0] https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...

Personal experience attempting to open an account with them while living in a developing country. Granted, this was about 5 years ago so the situation may have changed since then.

> Wise is not available for account setup in the vast majority of developing countries, so if that's your solution it's already a failure.

I was ranking options from worst to best. Best would be something like Wise. Second-best would be a stable coin from an issuer that isn't an outright fraud. And last would be any floating-rate coin.

Last year Bitcoin literally hit transaction fees of 20% of the GDP per capita of the worst-off countries and then fell 75% in value. I wouldn't wish a system like that on my worst enemies let alone of people I claim to be trying to help. It was massively outperformed by the Lira. I can't even find one that wasn't outperformed by the Lira. It may have been designed to meet this need but it utterly failed by any measure.

USDC is a strictly better option. And better than that would be a USDC like system that preserves privacy issued by a central bank.

> I'm not sure this argument still holds with all the defi options today.

Literally 10% of the entire TVL of DeFi was lost last year to hacks and shows somehow no sign of slowing down.

The real privilege is believing that poor folks are as risk tolerant as you are in a first-world country and that this is somehow a better solution than a nice home-grown payment network like M-PESA.

It’s like a cocaine-powered ruined fresco of the financial system.

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