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Comment by angio | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, which country are you based in? Because for people based in countries with high inflation, crypto is a great tool to get paid in usd and reinvest it without being forced by their governement to convert it into their currency. Obviously, if you're based in a country with a strong currency and where all financial intstruments are available, that's not important.

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“ Because for people based in countries with high inflation, crypto is a great tool to get paid in usd and reinvest it without being forced by their governement to convert it into their currency.”

I hear this quite a lot. Do we have any figures that say it’s actually happening at any scale?

Compare how many teams in crypto come from argentina (and latam in general) and south east asia compared to e.g. fintech or ai. In my experience many started by accepting remote jobs paid in crypto and then later working full time in the field.

This is a good article about the situation in Argentina:

https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/crypto-argentina-black-m...

Ah yes. The well-known stability of crypto... with value swings that put most volatile currencies to shame.

ahh yes the well known all coins are equal and all crypto id bitcoin.

No true cryptoscotsman

They use it for USDC, which is much better than buying dollars on the black market.

So they don't use cryptocurrencies per se. They pay people in us dollars aka fiat.

Same as companies using offshore bank accounts for the same purpose, or paying out cash in envelopes.

People getting paid in USDC of course still need to convert a large amount of it into local cash/cash-equivalent because they still have to pay rent, pay for food etc.

They use a blockchain to transact in USDC because it's more convenient that posting cash across borders. Freelancers usually don't have the financial means to open offshore companies.

> Freelancers usually don't have the financial means to open offshore companies.

So, "people in countries with high inflation"... is immediately reduced to just "freelancers".

I struggle to imagine how freelancers were paid before the advent of crypto.

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