People lining up in Argentina to have their iris scanned for Worldcoin
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It's unsurprising that basically any project that even comes close to seeming reputable is going to have attention. It'd be better for the country to have working fiscal and monetary policies, but it's not as if they've just had only a year, or four decades, of troubles in this regard. Changing broken, entrenched systems is just really hard.
So yes, every cryptocurrency project out there is probably going to have better chances of success in Argentina than anywhere else. Extrapolating from Argentina to the US or Western Europe is risky though.
Or, to put it another way, people in desperate circumstances are ripe for scams.
In addition, Argentina entrepreneurs are very unique in the region not only in Web3 but also in computer security among other areas. The headquarters are obviously incorporated in a good jurisdiction to avoid the country madness.
Just consider that.
The USD does all the same things that you describe crypto as doing for Argentinians, so now they just have a more accessible version of that?
That’s what all the billions of VC funding is leading to?
I’m just really waiting for a use case where both the cryptography and the decentralized consensus actually matter, and I just haven’t seen one. It’s sad from a technologists standpoint, since right now we are kind of just making complicated systems for the sake of being complicated.
> That’s what all the billions of VC funding is leading to?
Yes. Also evasion of Chinese capital controls, although they've cracked down on that a lot. Not clear to what extent it's being used for Russian sanctions evasion.
It's funny, isn't it? The system was built by someone radicalized by the 2008 financial crisis, which was a bank bailout that was for many countries revenue-neutral, and decided to build their own. But the 2008 crisis didn't have an inflation problem, meaning all the people complaining about money supply were wrong. No, the people with inflation problems were countries with forex issues, and everyone there is clamouring to get into the security of the dollar. Even if it's a pseudo-bond pegged to the dollar. There's no appetite for a flight from the dollar.
(big exceptions in 2008: Ireland, Iceland, Cyprus .. but again, none of those were money-printing related! You can still have a bad loans crisis in cryptocurrency, and indeed there have been several!)
As an Argentinian, there is a limit of dollars that you can buy per month using the official rate. If you want to buy more, you need to find someone that will sell you dollars at the blue rate (~2x more expensive). Due to this, even if you're making good money in Argentina (working for a US based company for example), you'll get hit heavily with the exchange rates, sometimes twice if you don't have a foreign bank account.
Source: I spent a couple months living in Buenos Aires.
Still, I'm curious about what is the process of buying crypto with Argentinian pesos? Any advice?
I'm not sure if this applies in BA, but in other countries, there are expat focused FB groups where people offer local currency conversion services. This often includes crypto. I would start there and find someone reputable in those communities. After that, retail street level gold dealers typically do it too, or know where to go.
I also wouldn't call it laundering either. If you own something valuable, you should be able to sell it. Laundering implies nefarious interactions and it isn't always nefarious.
In general, you can't travel with more than a few thousand $'s in cash. It is also personal safety risk. Having a way to travel the planet and convert locally as needed, seems like a valuable service, for regular people.
Of course one might say that you should use 'credit/debit cards' or services like western union... but if you've actually done travel to more 'out there' locations, that isn't always an option, full of high fees or just very difficult to use (things like language barriers and time delays).
I don't think that this is possible with most blockchain based implementations, because it would imply wallets can be administratively compromised.
Note also that _until they appear in person_ the imposter has full access to the victim's wallet. And disclosure time spans in the cyber security world would argue against this, because there won't be any money left 6 months after the incident happened.
I am not defending a specific implementation of biometricx + blockchain, like Worldcoin, merely pointing out that biometrics + blockchain is not inherently doomed for failure.
For a crude hypothetical example, suppose instead of iris scanning tattoos were used. Just for some artificial fluff consider some future human civilization, after the collapse of growth oriented racketeering, which was followed by naive universal basic income (resulting in wealth concentrating in land owners, since they can ratchet up rents to match any basic income), which in turn also collapsed. So in response the World Cadastre Coin was created: it was agreed that regardless of religion or atheistic beliefs, almost surely no-one believes humans created the earth, the sunlight that falls on it, the plants we eat etc. So this hypothetical future society agrees that since there was no human creator of the earth, that each parcel of earth, sea, land etc is either marked for wild nature or for human utilization. Those parts of the earth earmarked for human exploitation were agreed to be rented out to the highest bidder, with all rents instantaneously redistributed on a per capita basis. So everyone gets the average rent. By then humans had settled on due process and rule of law on a blockchain governed by formal verification, quickly resulting in policies with provable properties getting more attention than policies with vacuously proclaimed properties. Since the average rent system has the attractive property that it is affordable by definition, and doesn't require income taxation it quickly became the population preference. If one wants to live in a place that costs more than the average rent, or economically exploit land, territory, mines etc. worth more than average you'll have to work for the additional income to afford it. Those who are satisfied with less than average can save up money for when they decide they are ready to try their own entrepreneurial idea.
In their timeline's past, it was never forgotten how big tech had turned out complicit with the CCP (which collapsed due to provable impossibility of socialized healthcare, if one also takes into account the future generations). So it was decided that to establish sybil-free tokens, one couldn't rely on iris scans, retina scans etc for which a complicated device was required. Instead uniformly located tattoos were selected, on the forehead. Everyone could generate a unique number and have it tattooed on their forehead. Anyone has the ability to read a tattoo when given such opportunity. The blockchain associates a cryptographic receiving address per personal tattoo number. On that address you receive one average rent second per second, or accumulating over the span of a month one average rent month per month. (Underlyingly the blockchain actually uses the elapsed time whenever you make transactions,...). If one somehow loses their private key (stolen computer, etc.), all one has to do is generate a new keypair, report the issue (have some pre-indicated friends confirm the issue on the blockchain), upon which the blockchain as a group rolls provably random dice to select random citizens in a relatively big neighborhood around you. These random citizens will function as proctors: they inspect if you have the relevant number tattooed on your forehead, and if the proctors upon returning to their respective homes are in agreement the blockchain will associate your new address public key which you shared with the proctors to the abstract citizen indicated by your forehead tattoo number.
A sane society would have keypairs expire after some time so that people must repeat this process, so that next of kin aren't receiving average rents for already deceased family members for years on end.
There would be no incentive for a criminal to "steal" your tattoo number and modify his tattoo to look like yours: the same average rent is awarded to him as to you. The only incentive would be to receive your average rent on top of his own, but that wouldn't last long as upon deassociation of your private key with your tattoo number you would promptly arrange for a reidentification so you can start receiving the average rent again. It would be a real petty criminal to repeat tattoo his own face for what, a few hours or days of rent? And he'd get caught eventually.
Who organizes and pays for all of these in-person sessions?
How many people have access to reset a private key, and how trustworthy are they?
What happens to people who can't verify themselves in person (disabled, remote area, no transport, etc)?
If you need all of this organization and centralization, what's the point of using crypto?
Consider that huge numbers of people move to Argentina because it is an improvement on where they were.
https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/inflation-rates...
Peronism paid off 50% of the debts since 2001 until a right wing government doubled the debt again.
I’m nut a huge fan of any of the Peronist governments but when other groups got or took the opportunity it was way worse.
That is why Argentina was in the top 10 of the world until Peron, and now we barely make it to the middle.
He created a movement of people that they indoctrinated to believe that Peron is god and everything they say is saint's words.
My family suffered persecution from the party: my grandfather had a refrigerators SMB, the syndicate came to him and asked to provide X number (I don't recall) of refrigerators so that they can give them away to the poor. My grandfather gave them and then had to close.
He was also a pedophile, my mother told the story and how he would come to the school and put money in his pants, so that the girls of the school can take it out from his pants.
He supported Mussolini and the Nazis, there are many families of Nazis in Argentina, people that escaped from Europe with the complicity of Peron.
77 years latter we have populism (8 million people support the remaining 40 million in Argentina), corruption, fanatics, more corruption, 6 in 10 kids do not eat all days, etc. etc.
Yeah, right, Peron's first government was fantastic.
Like it or not, Worldcoin could be a game changer in at least one or two ways.