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I agree with most of the points raised by the author but as a Venezuelan Bitcoin is a godsend. If you live abroad and want to send remittances to your friends a

I agree with most of the points raised by the author but as a Venezuelan Bitcoin is a godsend. If you live abroad and want to send remittances to your friends and family it can be pretty easy in a normal country , with wire transfers,western union and so on. If your family lives in Venezuela your options are extremely more limited. These are some of the options Venezuelans have had to use: 1. Ask the money to be sent to Colombia with WU and then travel hundreds of kms to get what usually amounts to a few hundred dollars at most. 2. Use Zelle, send dollars in the US, and receive Bolivares in Venezuela. But for that you need to have an US bank account, and find a person you can trust also with an US bank account and plenty of highly volatile Bolivares in Venezuela willing to make the exchange. 3. Use paypal, same as above with way higher commissions and the risk that paypal (and the other person) will fuck you. 4. Buy Amazon gift cards and use the same schema above, be exposed to scams and high commisions fees. Trading bitcoins in say localbitcoins.com, you have a very liquid market and somewhat secure transactions (Bitcoins are not liberated until you check the money is in the Venezuela account). There are risks of course, especially because of BTC volatility but at least is a fast,convenient,widespread option. I wish something like that, only more stable and with less of that Tulip-craze whiff BTC has.

ur-whale 6y ago
>western union if you don't mind the usury-level fees
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Their fees are surprisingly competitive, take another look. In places where fees are high it usually has to do with risks of doing business in the locale that they have to price in.
- olcor 6y ago
  Western Union had, hands-down, the best rates and the least hassle for me sending money to my home country. The old reputation of WU just doesn't hold ground any more.
wpietri 6y ago
Is this from personal experience? And is there any data available to show that it's doing significant volume in Venezuela versus other options?
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I'm not OP. I looked and Chainalytics claim Venezuela is world number 3 in bitcoin use. But it's not clear what they're basing that on. My (very limited) understanding is that they can't directly see the country of origin of a bitcoin transaction. So they must be relying on figures from exchanges or apps? https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrency-market-2020 https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrenc... Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network?
  - AlexCoventry 6y ago
    > Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network? In this kind of setting, where the transaction is illicit, you wouldn't go through an exchange, you'd publish the transaction directly to the bitcoin network, and organizations like chainalytics do track the origin IP addresses.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      That makes sense. Not to criticise but... Isn't the IP of a transaction initiator being public a bit of a design flaw? Is it just assumed that users will obscure their own IPs (vpn, tor, etc)? Otherwise my isp/government can see my transactions and infer wallet ownership and I'm suddenly very un-anonymous...
      - gruez 6y ago
        Transactions are relayed to all the nodes in the network, not broadcast. That means when a node sees a transaction from another node, it's impossible to know whether the node was the originator of the transaction, or was merely relaying it from another node. AFAIK bitcoin core also has some mitigations such as delaying broadcast to a subset of the nodes, to make it look like your node wasn't the first node to learn about the transaction.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
The only reason BTC works in this scenario is that the authorities are not chasing it down. If they decide to, it will be just as unviable as the other options and authorities have many methods at their disposal to make bitcoin transfers difficult. BTC is cool, but no amount of tech can solve what is essentially a policy issue: overseas remittances.
- feanaro 6y ago
  Why is it obvious that no amount of tech can solve it? Tech can also influence policy. If something is nearly impossible to stop, it likely won't be stopped. The policy will be changed instead.
  - graeme 6y ago
    This hasn’t proven true in countries with functioning govts: they very much have applied tax and securities law to bitcoin.
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      The rideshare industry had a clear impact on local laws in every first world country for one example.
      - graeme 6y ago
        Right, because it was hard to control and ridesharing was clearly better. My point was the experience in functioning countries has not shown this to be true of bitcoin. It has been easy enough for govts to enforce tax and security laws where they’ve tried. What laws have been changed for bitcoin?
        jimmaswell 6y ago
        The IRS issued official guidance on it but there's no need for new laws around it.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Personal experience: not only bitcoin was the only practical way I was able to receive funds in Russia from an Indonesian client, it was cheaper than just one leg of converting Indonesian currency (to USD). Think of it. Buying bitcoin, sending and selling resulted being cheaper than just buying USD. The spread was that much lower. (It was in a relatively static price period in summer 2016) And regular banks just didn't do such transactions between Russia and Indonesia, like, nope. And PayPal was somehow banning the client for some reason.
- thegjp210 6y ago
  how much counterparty risk does the rapid price fluctuation result in? Can't imagine pricing a contract in bitcoin, as someone's getting screwed at payment if the BTC/fiat rate has changed during the lifetime of the contract
  - cambalache 6y ago
    You can peg the contract in USD (or better put, the original price was in USD) and just accept the bitcoins within a very small window, say 30 min/1h.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    We just accepted the price of bitcoin in USD at the time the client bought BTC, and I accepted the risks of fluctuating price to myself. I actually gained somewhat, though, way less than if I'd just hold those coins till today. :)
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    Don't you have a similar problem with Russian currency? From Jun 2014 to Jan 2015, it lost more than half of it's value relative to USD.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      In the past 110 years Russian currency depreciated against USD at a something like trillion times. It's a safe bet that it'll continue the trend (with some occasional and not too long lapses of stae slowish decline), and actually bitcoin is a rather safe bet against rouble. After all, it's not backed by Putin's government!
1-6 6y ago
Why aren’t there any mention of highly popular alt-coins like Litecoin? It’s less volatile for real use as a fiat alternative and transaction speeds are a lot faster because of the low service fee to speed things up. I kinda regretted keeping funds in Litecoin but it was one of the first to fix Bitcoin’s shortcomings.
- 1337biz 6y ago
  Litecoin is extremely under the radar right now. With the upcoming MimbleWimble integration it could become a privacy alternative to Monero.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    An unsuspecting onlooker would be easily convinced that this comment is random babble generated by a bot.
    - ur-whale 6y ago
      To be fair, neither of you are providing any tangible, verifiable fact one way or the other. Is there a Mimblewimble / Litecoin integration effort? If so, I'd sure love to learn more about it. And if there isn't can you offer something in the way of a proof?
      - tromp 6y ago
        You can see the progress of the MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Block) project here [1], headed by Grin++ [2] developer David Burkett. [1] https://litecoindotcom.medium.com/litecoin-mimblewimble-november-update-218f97fa0bf0 https://litecoindotcom.medium.com/litecoin-mimblewimble-nove... [2] https://grinplusplus.github.io/ https://grinplusplus.github.io/
        ur-whale 6y ago
        TY
- 6y ago
nootropicat 6y ago
Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cambalache 6y ago
  Of course! Every exchange and currency are as valuable and accepted as the group decides them to be. Same way you can pay anywhere with US dollars and not with South-African Rands.
  - redisman 6y ago
    > you can pay anywhere with US dollars Huh? Maybe with a credit card that converts your usd to a local currency. I’d like to see you walk into a French or Japanese grocery store and offer them your freedom bucks
- firekvz 6y ago
  Localbitcoins doesnt exchange stables. Binance does exchange USDT to VES but is not that popular
giardini 6y ago
They could use hawala, a value exchange system which has been around for centuries. Fees are reasonable, the system is extremely trustworthy and use is not limited to Muslims.
- jiofih 6y ago
  TransferWise is the tech incarnation of it. I bet they don’t operate in Venezuela due to US trade sanctions.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    The TransferWise model is the future of global banking imho (disclosure: I work in the financial infra space). One user account, the ability to hold a variety of currencies simultaneously, and banking info for each currency to plug into financial rails for said currency (routing/acct in US, IBAN in the EU, etc). Turns out money is just rows in a database and ISO 20022 messages, queued and processed.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I had enormous problems trying to do anything with Transferwise from Cambodia. It's still plagued with problems left over from the conventional banking system.
      - dehrmann 6y ago
        This loops back to one of the few things cryptocurrencies do well: they're extrajudicial, so they're often used for illegal transactions (drugs, ransom, bypassing sanctions). Bitcoin just happens to be really bad for this since the blockchain is forever.
megameter 6y ago
I see BTC as an immensely successful first try at making this kind of thing - and like any emerging tech it's slow, inefficient, sharp edges, mostly used by experts. It's a tech channeled towards an Ayn Randian utopian fantasy, and has run right into the limits of that fantasy as a working philosophy. And yet, it still has practically useful properties. The coins that win as a currency will have to loosen their grasp on the rentier-merchant aspects, become more energy efficient, more usable, more integrated into society(within and without its institutions).
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > and like any emerging tech The problem that everyone else sees is that Bitcoin has been "emerging tech" with all its rough edges for so many years.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Is that wrong? What other new asset class was developed this rapidly?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Think about what other technology is 12 years old you’d call “nascent” - 12 years is an eternity in tech. The iPhone is 12 years old and bears only a passing semblance to what was launched. Bitcoin is practically identical. The first ETF launched in 1993, and 12 years later they had 400 billion in net asset value - 533 adjusted for inflation. Your argument that the growth is unprecedented is specious.
      - shawnz 6y ago
        Yeah, but I believe it's the economic side which is moving slowly, not the technological side. People have been working on improved technologies for cryptocurrencies for a while now but the problem is that none of them have gained the same trust as Bitcoin.
xony 6y ago
Venezuela? come on , You mean only failed states use it. all these sites could be banned any day.
firekvz 6y ago
Another fellow Venezuelan here, this guy points are actually wrong and he's just using the momentum to prove some point related to bitcoin that is not true Before hand, I would like people to know that the current VES:USD rates are the following: - Official rate: 1.107.198,58 per each USD [1] - Unofficial rate: 1.027.812,89 per each USD [2] So now, The way that remittances work in Venezuela is pretty simple, let’s say a person A, wants to send 100$ to his grandma in Venezuela, and Person B has Venezuelan Bolivars. Person A gets in contact with person B (or viceversa), they agree on a rate based on the 2 rates i said before, person A sends the 100$ usd to person B and person B sends the Venezuelan Bolivars equivalent to person A grandmother. There is always a factor trust on said trade/ remittance where someone has to send the money 1st. Now, this exchange for the USD side is USUALLY made using Zelle (in the case of USD remittances) but its also done a lot in actual cash USD, it can also be done in any other method such as Paypal, AirTM, Cashapp, Venmo, etc.. it could even be in hello kitty coins if person A and B agrees. It doesnt really matter.. As for the venezuelan bolivars parts, its always done in venezuelan banks. What the poster here says in point (1) its wrong, you can use W.U, MoneyGram to send money to Venezuela, it uses the official exchange rate, thus, you don't have to go to colombia to send money to venezuela, remitances using those services are working online (they deposit to your bank), there is also fully operational exchanges like zoom casa de cambio, that will take remitances from different companies worldwide. [3] So this is my point. As I say, venezuelans do not need bitcoin, they could trade even hello kitty online coins or whatever any other method that allows them to send some value worth. Directly, they just use Zelle or cash, some others use paypal or whatever they want. So, bitcoin doesn't really benefits Venezuelans, the only thing that benefits venezuelans is the localbitcoins escrow service, but this is not because its cripto or because its bitcoin, it's just because noone else offers an escrow service to sucessfully exchange currency, that's pretty much it. Venezuelans just lack some place to properly exchange money it doesnt need bitcoin In fact, if you go ahead and check localbitcoin prices for exchange between VES:USD, the rate is always worse, you can check this site that tracks the rate on real time [https://dolardeverdad.com/ https://dolardeverdad.com/] Adding to this, there is another layer to this, it's the fact that it's really hard for Venezuelans to convert bitcoin into USD, not only because we are not welcome on sites like coinbase.com Now, you wonder right now, how come there is a lot of bitcoin being bought in venezuela's localbitcoin market, now I will answer you, it's plain and simple money laundering, that's it, there is drug dealers, corrupt goverment officials and a bunch of shady people who has TONS of venezuelans bolivars and they want to get them turned into something else. Using my example before, the person B would be the corrupt/drug dealer and the person A would be you trying to send money to your grandma So no, don't come with the "bitcoin is saving venezuela" speech, it', Bitcoin its a workaround for corruption and dirty venezuelan money to find its way into USD. [1] http://www.bcv.org.ve/ http://www.bcv.org.ve/ [2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CJbfgj3FLft/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJbfgj3FLft/ [3] https://www.zoomcasadecambio.com/ https://www.zoomcasadecambio.com/
arcticbull 6y ago
It’s a godsend to a small handful of Venezuelans, it’s not a general solution as of course a transaction fee is a few months minimum wage. It does literally nothing to solve the problem more broadly. You’d be better off holding value on their behalf stateside. Of course the government could shut it off in a heartbeat. How many North Koreans does Bitcoin help?
- firekvz 6y ago
  read my answer, it's pretty well explained there
  - jcrubino 6y ago
    You are all missing the the trend over the last 7 years for bitcoin is to create a digital asset that is a store of wealth. To say bitcoin is a payments system in the sense of cash is to miss the executed tech roadmap where cheap one off transactions is a secondary concern (not bitcoin core's). Listen Saylor talk about MicroStrategy's investment in bitcoin. He is very clear that is a store of wealth and appreciating asset on the books, not a payment rail for MicroStrategy subscription base.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      They haven’t changed Bitcoin a single bit since 2008. Saylor sounds like he got taken by the Bitcoin euphoria.
      - jcrubino 6y ago
        The point is the commenters here on this thread listen to too many youtube crypto channels for an accurate analysis of what bitcoin is and wants to be.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      Currency has more than two functions. Transferring wealth is not the same as paying for goods, and storing wealth is not the same as holding a speculative asset class. Bitcoin is volatile. Holding it is more like holding gold, not USD. Bitcoin is very easy to move across borders. Moving it is much more like a bank transfer, than paying for a pizza.
kryogen1c 6y ago
you are exactly arguing the authors point, just in a use-case not specifically addressed. the hassle involved in transfurring funds internationally exists for a reason, and as soon we rediscover the associated problems there will be an outcry for some manner of regulation bitcoin purposefully subverted in the first place.
aik 6y ago
There are options like SureRemit that has extremely low fees built for this exact purpose (at least that’s what it’s being built for). Hope this purpose of blockchain tech pans out and improves compared to other existing options.
Fti 6y ago
Check out Stellar, it’s been created for that, Faster than bitcoin and really lows fees.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  >Check out Stellar Great idea given that they're next on the SEC's list once they're done tearing Ripple a new one.
  - easton 6y ago
    That stinks, given that their technology actually made crypto viable for everyday transactions.
rthomas6 6y ago
Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?
- uncletammy 6y ago
  There's not a good reason. Of all the cryptocurrencies, BTC is one of the worst for this use case.
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    Of course there's a good reason. BTC is much, much easier for the Indonesian person on one side of the contract to purchase with their local currency, and much, much easier for the Russian person on the other side of the contract to liquidate into their local currency. Almost any country has a highly liquid market of local currency <-> BTC, and that's often not true for any other crypto.
- Taek 6y ago
  Bitcoin has the most infrastructure surrounding it. And Bitcoin is the most careful to make life easy for infrastructure providers. Eth is very challenging to operate securely. Breaking updates are frequent, often with little warning. Bitcoin hasn't changed in many years, and new software updates are optional, and don't require you to write any new code or change how you operate. Most other cryptos suffer from the same challenges. Eth has more features and flexibility, but for the explicit use case of sovereign money, Bitcoin really stands in a class of its own.
  - throwaway666494 6y ago
    Breaking updates are not frequent, there's never been a breaking update on the ethereum blockchain. Bitcoin changes all the time (e.g., taproot)
    - seibelj 6y ago
      Ethereum literally just had this issue a month ago https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-hard-fork-disruption https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-hard-fork-disruption Binance had to suspend wallets because of it
dehrmann 6y ago
Not to downplay the shitty situation that Venezuela is in right now, it says something when that's the only situation a quasi-currency is good in. It's almost like for all of Bitcoin's problems, Venezuela has more.
chapelierfou 6y ago
Stop shilling, please.
CyberDildonics 6y ago
How do people use bitcoin effectively when it has $9 transaction fees from having its block size limited? Do you mean cryptocurrency in general?
- alwillis 6y ago
  The fee someone pays to get a transaction into a block is similar to what passengers pay to be on the same flight—everyone pays something different. You could have paid $300 while the person sitting next to you could have significantly more or less, depending on a whole host of factors. Same with bitcoin: someone could have paid $1.50 for a transaction in the same block as your $9 transaction, depending on its size and how quickly the sender needed to have it confirmed. Someone also paid $.50 to be in that block but they were okay with waiting for an hour before it would be confirmed. A dashboard such as https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io will show you fee estimates.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    What you are saying is somewhere between a gross distortion and a lie. I said $9 because the average transaction was $9, the median was over $5. If someone is paying $300 under those circumstances it is because they have a large, complex transaction. Transaction sizes vary, transactions costs aren't as random as you are implying. > someone could have paid $1.50 for a transaction in the same block as your $9 transaction, depending on its size and how quickly the sender needed to have it confirmed. That's not how it works. Most transactions are small, you can't somehow cut them down to a fraction of the size it takes for a basic transaction from one address to another. > Someone also paid $.50 to be in that block What transaction is what block are you talking about? I didn't mention a specific block, some have had even higher average transaction costs. Where did you see that? > but they were okay with waiting for an hour before it would be confirmed. Again, that isn't how it works. If you put a transaction fee that is too low, you wait until there are no higher value transactions for yours to be included into a block.
piracy1 6y ago
You could buy either a stablecoin or ETH (it tends to have more liquidity) and uniswap to a stablecoin like USDC (Owned by Circle and Coinbase, not sketchy, decent liquidity) or USDT (kinda sketchy, insane liquidity). Then you are only really exposed to the volitility for the time it takes to swap, with uniswap that can be literally seconds.

ur-whale 6y ago

>western union if you don't mind the usury-level fees

arcticbull 6y ago
Their fees are surprisingly competitive, take another look. In places where fees are high it usually has to do with risks of doing business in the locale that they have to price in.
olcor 6y ago
Western Union had, hands-down, the best rates and the least hassle for me sending money to my home country. The old reputation of WU just doesn't hold ground any more.

wpietri 6y ago

Is this from personal experience? And is there any data available to show that it's doing significant volume in Venezuela versus other options?

LatteLazy 6y ago
I'm not OP. I looked and Chainalytics claim Venezuela is world number 3 in bitcoin use. But it's not clear what they're basing that on. My (very limited) understanding is that they can't directly see the country of origin of a bitcoin transaction. So they must be relying on figures from exchanges or apps? https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrency-market-2020 https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/venezuela-cryptocurrenc... Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network?
- AlexCoventry 6y ago
  > Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network? In this kind of setting, where the transaction is illicit, you wouldn't go through an exchange, you'd publish the transaction directly to the bitcoin network, and organizations like chainalytics do track the origin IP addresses.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    That makes sense. Not to criticise but... Isn't the IP of a transaction initiator being public a bit of a design flaw? Is it just assumed that users will obscure their own IPs (vpn, tor, etc)? Otherwise my isp/government can see my transactions and infer wallet ownership and I'm suddenly very un-anonymous...
    - gruez 6y ago
      Transactions are relayed to all the nodes in the network, not broadcast. That means when a node sees a transaction from another node, it's impossible to know whether the node was the originator of the transaction, or was merely relaying it from another node. AFAIK bitcoin core also has some mitigations such as delaying broadcast to a subset of the nodes, to make it look like your node wasn't the first node to learn about the transaction.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

The only reason BTC works in this scenario is that the authorities are not chasing it down. If they decide to, it will be just as unviable as the other options and authorities have many methods at their disposal to make bitcoin transfers difficult. BTC is cool, but no amount of tech can solve what is essentially a policy issue: overseas remittances.

feanaro 6y ago
Why is it obvious that no amount of tech can solve it? Tech can also influence policy. If something is nearly impossible to stop, it likely won't be stopped. The policy will be changed instead.
- graeme 6y ago
  This hasn’t proven true in countries with functioning govts: they very much have applied tax and securities law to bitcoin.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    The rideshare industry had a clear impact on local laws in every first world country for one example.
    - graeme 6y ago
      Right, because it was hard to control and ridesharing was clearly better. My point was the experience in functioning countries has not shown this to be true of bitcoin. It has been easy enough for govts to enforce tax and security laws where they’ve tried. What laws have been changed for bitcoin?
      - jimmaswell 6y ago
        The IRS issued official guidance on it but there's no need for new laws around it.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Personal experience: not only bitcoin was the only practical way I was able to receive funds in Russia from an Indonesian client, it was cheaper than just one leg of converting Indonesian currency (to USD). Think of it. Buying bitcoin, sending and selling resulted being cheaper than just buying USD. The spread was that much lower. (It was in a relatively static price period in summer 2016) And regular banks just didn't do such transactions between Russia and Indonesia, like, nope. And PayPal was somehow banning the client for some reason.

thegjp210 6y ago
how much counterparty risk does the rapid price fluctuation result in? Can't imagine pricing a contract in bitcoin, as someone's getting screwed at payment if the BTC/fiat rate has changed during the lifetime of the contract
- cambalache 6y ago
  You can peg the contract in USD (or better put, the original price was in USD) and just accept the bitcoins within a very small window, say 30 min/1h.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  We just accepted the price of bitcoin in USD at the time the client bought BTC, and I accepted the risks of fluctuating price to myself. I actually gained somewhat, though, way less than if I'd just hold those coins till today. :)
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Don't you have a similar problem with Russian currency? From Jun 2014 to Jan 2015, it lost more than half of it's value relative to USD.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    In the past 110 years Russian currency depreciated against USD at a something like trillion times. It's a safe bet that it'll continue the trend (with some occasional and not too long lapses of stae slowish decline), and actually bitcoin is a rather safe bet against rouble. After all, it's not backed by Putin's government!

1-6 6y ago

Why aren’t there any mention of highly popular alt-coins like Litecoin? It’s less volatile for real use as a fiat alternative and transaction speeds are a lot faster because of the low service fee to speed things up. I kinda regretted keeping funds in Litecoin but it was one of the first to fix Bitcoin’s shortcomings.

1337biz 6y ago
Litecoin is extremely under the radar right now. With the upcoming MimbleWimble integration it could become a privacy alternative to Monero.
- jiofih 6y ago
  An unsuspecting onlooker would be easily convinced that this comment is random babble generated by a bot.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    To be fair, neither of you are providing any tangible, verifiable fact one way or the other. Is there a Mimblewimble / Litecoin integration effort? If so, I'd sure love to learn more about it. And if there isn't can you offer something in the way of a proof?
    - tromp 6y ago
      You can see the progress of the MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Block) project here [1], headed by Grin++ [2] developer David Burkett. [1] https://litecoindotcom.medium.com/litecoin-mimblewimble-november-update-218f97fa0bf0 https://litecoindotcom.medium.com/litecoin-mimblewimble-nove... [2] https://grinplusplus.github.io/ https://grinplusplus.github.io/
      - ur-whale 6y ago
        TY
6y ago

nootropicat 6y ago

Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cambalache 6y ago
Of course! Every exchange and currency are as valuable and accepted as the group decides them to be. Same way you can pay anywhere with US dollars and not with South-African Rands.
- redisman 6y ago
  > you can pay anywhere with US dollars Huh? Maybe with a credit card that converts your usd to a local currency. I’d like to see you walk into a French or Japanese grocery store and offer them your freedom bucks
firekvz 6y ago
Localbitcoins doesnt exchange stables. Binance does exchange USDT to VES but is not that popular

giardini 6y ago

They could use hawala, a value exchange system which has been around for centuries. Fees are reasonable, the system is extremely trustworthy and use is not limited to Muslims.

jiofih 6y ago
TransferWise is the tech incarnation of it. I bet they don’t operate in Venezuela due to US trade sanctions.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  The TransferWise model is the future of global banking imho (disclosure: I work in the financial infra space). One user account, the ability to hold a variety of currencies simultaneously, and banking info for each currency to plug into financial rails for said currency (routing/acct in US, IBAN in the EU, etc). Turns out money is just rows in a database and ISO 20022 messages, queued and processed.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I had enormous problems trying to do anything with Transferwise from Cambodia. It's still plagued with problems left over from the conventional banking system.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      This loops back to one of the few things cryptocurrencies do well: they're extrajudicial, so they're often used for illegal transactions (drugs, ransom, bypassing sanctions). Bitcoin just happens to be really bad for this since the blockchain is forever.

megameter 6y ago

I see BTC as an immensely successful first try at making this kind of thing - and like any emerging tech it's slow, inefficient, sharp edges, mostly used by experts. It's a tech channeled towards an Ayn Randian utopian fantasy, and has run right into the limits of that fantasy as a working philosophy. And yet, it still has practically useful properties. The coins that win as a currency will have to loosen their grasp on the rentier-merchant aspects, become more energy efficient, more usable, more integrated into society(within and without its institutions).

madeofpalk 6y ago
> and like any emerging tech The problem that everyone else sees is that Bitcoin has been "emerging tech" with all its rough edges for so many years.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Is that wrong? What other new asset class was developed this rapidly?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Think about what other technology is 12 years old you’d call “nascent” - 12 years is an eternity in tech. The iPhone is 12 years old and bears only a passing semblance to what was launched. Bitcoin is practically identical. The first ETF launched in 1993, and 12 years later they had 400 billion in net asset value - 533 adjusted for inflation. Your argument that the growth is unprecedented is specious.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      Yeah, but I believe it's the economic side which is moving slowly, not the technological side. People have been working on improved technologies for cryptocurrencies for a while now but the problem is that none of them have gained the same trust as Bitcoin.

xony 6y ago

Venezuela? come on , You mean only failed states use it. all these sites could be banned any day.

firekvz 6y ago

Another fellow Venezuelan here, this guy points are actually wrong and he's just using the momentum to prove some point related to bitcoin that is not true Before hand, I would like people to know that the current VES:USD rates are the following: - Official rate: 1.107.198,58 per each USD [1] - Unofficial rate: 1.027.812,89 per each USD [2] So now, The way that remittances work in Venezuela is pretty simple, let’s say a person A, wants to send 100$ to his grandma in Venezuela, and Person B has Venezuelan Bolivars. Person A gets in contact with person B (or viceversa), they agree on a rate based on the 2 rates i said before, person A sends the 100$ usd to person B and person B sends the Venezuelan Bolivars equivalent to person A grandmother. There is always a factor trust on said trade/ remittance where someone has to send the money 1st. Now, this exchange for the USD side is USUALLY made using Zelle (in the case of USD remittances) but its also done a lot in actual cash USD, it can also be done in any other method such as Paypal, AirTM, Cashapp, Venmo, etc.. it could even be in hello kitty coins if person A and B agrees. It doesnt really matter.. As for the venezuelan bolivars parts, its always done in venezuelan banks. What the poster here says in point (1) its wrong, you can use W.U, MoneyGram to send money to Venezuela, it uses the official exchange rate, thus, you don't have to go to colombia to send money to venezuela, remitances using those services are working online (they deposit to your bank), there is also fully operational exchanges like zoom casa de cambio, that will take remitances from different companies worldwide. [3] So this is my point. As I say, venezuelans do not need bitcoin, they could trade even hello kitty online coins or whatever any other method that allows them to send some value worth. Directly, they just use Zelle or cash, some others use paypal or whatever they want. So, bitcoin doesn't really benefits Venezuelans, the only thing that benefits venezuelans is the localbitcoins escrow service, but this is not because its cripto or because its bitcoin, it's just because noone else offers an escrow service to sucessfully exchange currency, that's pretty much it. Venezuelans just lack some place to properly exchange money it doesnt need bitcoin In fact, if you go ahead and check localbitcoin prices for exchange between VES:USD, the rate is always worse, you can check this site that tracks the rate on real time [https://dolardeverdad.com/ https://dolardeverdad.com/] Adding to this, there is another layer to this, it's the fact that it's really hard for Venezuelans to convert bitcoin into USD, not only because we are not welcome on sites like coinbase.com Now, you wonder right now, how come there is a lot of bitcoin being bought in venezuela's localbitcoin market, now I will answer you, it's plain and simple money laundering, that's it, there is drug dealers, corrupt goverment officials and a bunch of shady people who has TONS of venezuelans bolivars and they want to get them turned into something else. Using my example before, the person B would be the corrupt/drug dealer and the person A would be you trying to send money to your grandma So no, don't come with the "bitcoin is saving venezuela" speech, it', Bitcoin its a workaround for corruption and dirty venezuelan money to find its way into USD. [1] http://www.bcv.org.ve/ http://www.bcv.org.ve/ [2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CJbfgj3FLft/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJbfgj3FLft/ [3] https://www.zoomcasadecambio.com/ https://www.zoomcasadecambio.com/

arcticbull 6y ago

It’s a godsend to a small handful of Venezuelans, it’s not a general solution as of course a transaction fee is a few months minimum wage. It does literally nothing to solve the problem more broadly. You’d be better off holding value on their behalf stateside. Of course the government could shut it off in a heartbeat. How many North Koreans does Bitcoin help?

firekvz 6y ago
read my answer, it's pretty well explained there
- jcrubino 6y ago
  You are all missing the the trend over the last 7 years for bitcoin is to create a digital asset that is a store of wealth. To say bitcoin is a payments system in the sense of cash is to miss the executed tech roadmap where cheap one off transactions is a secondary concern (not bitcoin core's). Listen Saylor talk about MicroStrategy's investment in bitcoin. He is very clear that is a store of wealth and appreciating asset on the books, not a payment rail for MicroStrategy subscription base.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    They haven’t changed Bitcoin a single bit since 2008. Saylor sounds like he got taken by the Bitcoin euphoria.
    - jcrubino 6y ago
      The point is the commenters here on this thread listen to too many youtube crypto channels for an accurate analysis of what bitcoin is and wants to be.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    Currency has more than two functions. Transferring wealth is not the same as paying for goods, and storing wealth is not the same as holding a speculative asset class. Bitcoin is volatile. Holding it is more like holding gold, not USD. Bitcoin is very easy to move across borders. Moving it is much more like a bank transfer, than paying for a pizza.

kryogen1c 6y ago

you are exactly arguing the authors point, just in a use-case not specifically addressed. the hassle involved in transfurring funds internationally exists for a reason, and as soon we rediscover the associated problems there will be an outcry for some manner of regulation bitcoin purposefully subverted in the first place.

aik 6y ago

There are options like SureRemit that has extremely low fees built for this exact purpose (at least that’s what it’s being built for). Hope this purpose of blockchain tech pans out and improves compared to other existing options.

Fti 6y ago

Check out Stellar, it’s been created for that, Faster than bitcoin and really lows fees.

ur-whale 6y ago
>Check out Stellar Great idea given that they're next on the SEC's list once they're done tearing Ripple a new one.
- easton 6y ago
  That stinks, given that their technology actually made crypto viable for everyday transactions.

rthomas6 6y ago

Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?

uncletammy 6y ago
There's not a good reason. Of all the cryptocurrencies, BTC is one of the worst for this use case.
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  Of course there's a good reason. BTC is much, much easier for the Indonesian person on one side of the contract to purchase with their local currency, and much, much easier for the Russian person on the other side of the contract to liquidate into their local currency. Almost any country has a highly liquid market of local currency <-> BTC, and that's often not true for any other crypto.
Taek 6y ago
Bitcoin has the most infrastructure surrounding it. And Bitcoin is the most careful to make life easy for infrastructure providers. Eth is very challenging to operate securely. Breaking updates are frequent, often with little warning. Bitcoin hasn't changed in many years, and new software updates are optional, and don't require you to write any new code or change how you operate. Most other cryptos suffer from the same challenges. Eth has more features and flexibility, but for the explicit use case of sovereign money, Bitcoin really stands in a class of its own.
- throwaway666494 6y ago
  Breaking updates are not frequent, there's never been a breaking update on the ethereum blockchain. Bitcoin changes all the time (e.g., taproot)
  - seibelj 6y ago
    Ethereum literally just had this issue a month ago https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-hard-fork-disruption https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-hard-fork-disruption Binance had to suspend wallets because of it

dehrmann 6y ago

Not to downplay the shitty situation that Venezuela is in right now, it says something when that's the only situation a quasi-currency is good in. It's almost like for all of Bitcoin's problems, Venezuela has more.

chapelierfou 6y ago

Stop shilling, please.

CyberDildonics 6y ago

How do people use bitcoin effectively when it has $9 transaction fees from having its block size limited? Do you mean cryptocurrency in general?

alwillis 6y ago
The fee someone pays to get a transaction into a block is similar to what passengers pay to be on the same flight—everyone pays something different. You could have paid $300 while the person sitting next to you could have significantly more or less, depending on a whole host of factors. Same with bitcoin: someone could have paid $1.50 for a transaction in the same block as your $9 transaction, depending on its size and how quickly the sender needed to have it confirmed. Someone also paid $.50 to be in that block but they were okay with waiting for an hour before it would be confirmed. A dashboard such as https://bitbo.io https://bitbo.io will show you fee estimates.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  What you are saying is somewhere between a gross distortion and a lie. I said $9 because the average transaction was $9, the median was over $5. If someone is paying $300 under those circumstances it is because they have a large, complex transaction. Transaction sizes vary, transactions costs aren't as random as you are implying. > someone could have paid $1.50 for a transaction in the same block as your $9 transaction, depending on its size and how quickly the sender needed to have it confirmed. That's not how it works. Most transactions are small, you can't somehow cut them down to a fraction of the size it takes for a basic transaction from one address to another. > Someone also paid $.50 to be in that block What transaction is what block are you talking about? I didn't mention a specific block, some have had even higher average transaction costs. Where did you see that? > but they were okay with waiting for an hour before it would be confirmed. Again, that isn't how it works. If you put a transaction fee that is too low, you wait until there are no higher value transactions for yours to be included into a block.

piracy1 6y ago

You could buy either a stablecoin or ETH (it tends to have more liquidity) and uniswap to a stablecoin like USDC (Owned by Circle and Coinbase, not sketchy, decent liquidity) or USDT (kinda sketchy, insane liquidity). Then you are only really exposed to the volitility for the time it takes to swap, with uniswap that can be literally seconds.