Cryptocurrency doesn't address the hard parts of financial inclusion (2022)

Whether crypto hurts or helps financial inclusion remains to be seen in places like Africa and Latin America. The majority of coins are pump-and-dumps or rug pulls, but after 15+ years of BTC somehow surviving, I still have hope crypto can provide financial access to those without direct bank access in these areas without being massive scams or abused by crime.

Apart from that you don't want to have the volatility of most crypto to be a means of payment. "wait, my hard earned products are now worth 50 % less than an hour ago because some influencer in his basements mom did a rugpull?"

> For us, it’s much more important to have more traditional markers of trust, like approval from bank partners, billboards in major cities, TV and radio ads, and so on.

Trust is a function of marketing budget now?

Because none of that is the purpose of cryptocurrency. It for tax evasion by the rich, and for the cryptocurrency to seize when its used for crimes or when its defrauded out of someone else. And for riding a seemingly permanently rising currency to riches.

In any case, it boils down to "I can make money off cryptocurrency". It doesn't "help" people. If someone says that, they just want to evangelize it because they think that's the key to 'crypto go up'.

I'm finding a lot of these arguments to be disingenuous.

Much of the discussion is around "Meanwhile, most people trying to use cryptocurrency to improve financial inclusion aren’t even thinking about on-ramp problems." Kuhn is assuming an argument against a crypto purist who wants 100% crypto-to-crypto services and from there bringing up the real problem than there are not many cash<-->crypto services for people who need better inclusion. But, Kuhn is in exactly the position to provide that service and is choosing not to. Arguing that you don't want to provide crypto services because it's not inclusive because people aren't providing the service you could provide but choose not to because crypto is not inclusive because...

> These problems are solvable in principle, by using a stablecoin on a much more efficient blockchain. But that’s a whole lot of effort just to get the user experience back to the baseline that we’ve already built! And even once you’re there, it doesn’t seem like the blockchain has any meaningful advantages that are worth that cost.

Comes after arguing a strawman of "memorizing the exchange rate of fish to crypto" to say that the past few paragraphs are invalid and instead of building up the security of a literal money-vault Postgres database, the could have just built a secure key store for a stablecoin based service.

> For a technically sophisticated early adopter, the cryptocurrency pitch—“these algorithms guarantee that we can’t get your balance wrong, even if we’re malicious”—makes some sense. But a typical underbanked person in Senegal, who may not understand Merkle trees or Byzantine fault tolerance, might justifiably be skeptical. For us, it’s much more important to have more traditional markers of trust, like approval from bank partners, billboards in major cities, TV and radio ads, and so on.

This doesn't change regardless of what tech you use. The only difference is if the end goal of your marketing is "Trust me bro" or "You don't even need to trust me bro".

I'm kind of surprised that fraud protection isn't listed.

base has faster confirmation time and lower transaction fees (1% is absolutely ridiculous lol), they're just talking their book.