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Comment by himata4113 | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft and whatnot.

But all I know is that the only reason why some of my friends are able to work remotely from their country is crypto currency as that is the only way they're able to get paid without 30% to 40% being lost in fees as well as being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight. They work real, productive swe jobs and earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better.

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> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal

You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.

CashApp doesn’t seem any different than Wise; I routinely use both — including CashApp for crypto.

Who are these middlemen? The miners?

At the other end when you need to convert your crypto to real currency.

It's a very weird comment as people who actually use crypto (not flipping or holding) are those who without other viable choices. They're not replacing something. Those transactions would simply not happen without crypto.

Notice that the parent comment didn't use the word replacing.

This. Wise is good as long as you can open an account there. For many people this is not a viable option.

Yep, they can open a wise account to send money, but they cannot receive money using WISE, they have to open a business account to receive money and they cannot open one in their countries.

No, the parent used the word "bypassing", which implies someone being replaced by nothing.

You're entirely wrong about that. A bitcoin transaction costs me pennies a wire transfer costs me $40.

Most real financial transactions need to start and end in fiat though, and that's where the costs are

That depends though. I recently bought a car in south America and they were willing to take USDT through Bianance Pay. As a US person I don't have access to that so ended up having to wire transfer. I don't know why they wouldn't accept a Bitcoin deposit which they could have easily converted to tether but I suspect it's just a momentum and learning curve thing.

There are pretty big markets in these countries because of crypto and even then it never reaches the native currency a lot of the market uses either us dollar or euro. Businesses are glad to accept dollars and euros for most bigger purchases especially p2p marketplaces. The myth that you have to off-ramp crypto is no longer true.

Wise demands a massive fee through bid-offer spread, they're more expensive than many regular retail banks for FX conversion. They're basically running a deceptive advertising campaign due to customers not knowing about bid offer spread.

Wise is even worse than "zero-fee" stock trading platforms like Robin hood who do payment for order flow. At least PFOF is more competitive and regulated and you're only getting a few basis points stolen from you instead of like 80 basis points.

Wise fees are sometimes big, but I find them fairly transparent about it.

From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.

Then I suppose it depends on the FX pair and the bank. I was looking at $8k USD equivalent and the bid offer was worse than my retail bank

And they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption of bitcoin, if they support bitcoin in any form even with lightning.

A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?

They’re more likely to use a stablecoin and those don’t use Bitcoin.

I checked the internet and it seems el salvador uses bitcoin while in lebanon there is a mix of bitcoin + Lightning and Tether.

Tether is investing in US Bonds but 10% seem to be Bitcoin.

The El Salvador government bought Bitcoin and promoted it, but the reports I’ve seen suggest that ordinary people and businesses don’t use it much.

> they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption

Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this energy than crypto mining? The fact you don't see it as valuable?

Also many mining operations take advantage of stranded energy, so energy that would go to waste if not used for on-site mining.

But switching from Bitcoin to something based on proof of work is always going to use less energy. Bitcoin was innovative when it was invented, but now it’s antique, inefficient tech that’s still being used because apparently fame overwhelms all technological considerations.

There is no stranded energy.

Stranded energy is basically energy which should be used but its commercially a lot more efficient to do energy abitrage with a global finance market with a local energy market.

Thats the biggest shit of bitcoin ever.

And no 3% for provoding gambling and only a small amount of money value is a bad joke. 3% is not nothing.

We increased the climate change rate per decade from 0.2 to 0.4 due to the amount of co2. Everything hurts us here.

Bitcoin is responsible for a gas powerp lant in NYC being turned on again. It only mines bitcoins now. It creates just heat and co2.

Bitcoin is responsible for power stealing across the planet.

> Stranded energy is basically energy which should be used but its commercially a lot more efficient to do energy abitrage with a global finance market with a local energy market.

Incorrect. Stranded energy is energy that can’t be used and is wasted instead.

> And no 3% for provoding gambling and only a small amount of money value is a bad joke.

Thinking it only provides gambling is an opinion. One I disagree with.

> Bitcoin is responsible for a gas powerp lant in NYC being turned on again. It only mines bitcoins now. It creates just heat and co2.

Just like many things in life, Bitcoin the protocol is not responsible but the participants in the system. Regardless I don’t see a power plant being turned on as inherently a bad thing.

You don’t see it as worth it but the people who pay for it do. Who are you to decide what an entity chooses to legally utilize their power for?

I’m ignorant of this but it seems wrong.

30% lost in fees??

Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?

Also:

> being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight

I for sure put crypto in this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.

> Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?

Outside the West, the answer is quite often "no". And trying to open an account in the US from outside will run into ID+residency requirements.

> Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?

It's harder, if not impossible, if you've been got the wrong set of papers, or are missing them.

> this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.

Like it or not, USDC and USDT do seem to actually be stable. They've been pegged to the dollar for a while now, with increased scrutiny.

Yeah no, I it is really really bad where I live and it is similarly bad in places outaide of western financial network as far as I can understand.

Another way to mitigate this scam is wise revolut etc. But they are also mostly western

Sounds more like social security avoidance, or general taxation avoidance.

Which country will take 30% cut from incoming foreign transaction? The highest combined fees I could find are for Sub-Saharan Africa and those are below 10%, supporting tax/social evasion claim.

Could be completely legal but when folks don't provide details its often safe to assume the worse scenario when it comes to money, taxation and screwing the government.

I believe some countries e.g. Cuba have different "official" vs "black market" exchange rates. A 30% difference wouldn't surprise me.

What they are often talking about there is countries where the official exchange rate is very different from a real world exchange rate: This happened in Argentina quite often. That led to special black market stores where people would give you local currency for dollars at better rates, and often also had some crypto support. You are then going past the legal market either way.

Possibly? Yes. But for every Argentina, there's 10 other countries where you'd loose (far more than) 40% to social security, taxes, and middleman that will handle all the paperwork for for you, particularly if we are talking about "real, productive swe jobs [that] earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better."

I basically have one such job, living in a stable but bottom of the table EU economy, and 40% is exactly the ballpark.

People love to rationalize tax evasion like that.

This has nothing to do with tax evasion, we're priviledged to live in countries with stable financial systems.

> Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?

If you want to do financial crimes and fraud, you can't (or at least, shouldn't) really do this.

Unspoken by the parent poster is that in practice these people are usually using crypto to break the law in some way, which is why it's valuable to them.

"Break the law" is too weak of a term since it includes routing around the monetary systems overseen by incompetent / corrupt / totalitarian governments.

Roughly 10% of humanity is without papers and excluded from the banking system for life, also because western coutries enforce KYC/AML rules.

Crypto has utterly failed as a currency. In that regard it's been dead for over a decade. If btc or eth were currency they'd be considered dead by deflationary spiral which is more or less what every economist predicted from the start. Some people got rich by investing but getting rich off of currency speculation is generally awful for people who rely on that currency to live. Crypto has been a success the same way The Room was a successful movie.

And at least The Room didn't enable ransomware.

it would be cash shipments if crypto didn't exist or some other form of monetary value transfer.

>bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own

There are transaction fees so you're still paying someone. And the it's not government taking what you own, it's scammers!

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