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A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi. There are many different reasons to ow

A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi. There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability. The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regimes. A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else, and access their Bitcoin without the risk of it being confiscated during the journey, because they can simply memorise the seed phrase (24 words). It's predictable issuance schedule also makes it valuable in countries suffering from high inflation or hyper-inflation. This is a good article to rethink the use cases of Bitcoin: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-privilege https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri... Alex Gladstein works for the Human Rights Foundation and does lots of good work in Bitcoin advocacy. His other articles are worth checking out. And the data backs this up. Some of the biggest growth in Bitcoin users around the world have been in places around Africa and Vietnam who are subject to some of the situations mentioned above. Do you think these people see Bitcoin as a "Ponzi"? Do you think they care if such a definition doesn't change the properties they find useful/valuable?

qaq 5y ago
Generally people participating in a Ponzi scheme do not view it as such. The tactics deployed by truly oppressive regimes make anything easy to confiscate including bitcoin.
- glenvdb 5y ago
  Yes, the wrench technique will always ultimately win. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ But they have to know someone holds it in the first place. You can walk around with a seed phrase in your head and no one would know.
  - qaq 5y ago
    well you had to have something of value that you had to trade for bitcoin. Also in oppressive regimes the act of attempting to leave the country already makes you a suspect.
    - stale2002 5y ago
      > the act of attempting to leave the country They aren't going to immediately execute everyone who is crossing the border. Even in authoritarian regimes, some people may be able to leave, and borders are not completely shutdown. And in that situation, for those people, it is useful to be able to carry money, in a way where they do not know that you have it.
      - bb88 5y ago
        I mean sure, some people make it out of North Korea. A lot are publicly executed to be made an example of too. I think you fail to understand the power of a true authoritarian government, particularly if they can monitor and limit your access to the outside world. * Use a VPN, you're guilty of Treason. * Use a currency other than the North Korean won, you're guilty of treason. * Use an electronic device other than state sponsored devices, you're guilty of treason. All executions will be recorded for posterity and broadcast to the people as a reminder of the power of the state.
        deleted 5y ago
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  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Also don't forget multisig or Shamir secret sharing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anonporridge 5y ago
  True, sufficiently oppressive regimes can confiscate bitcoin in a lot of situations. However, as soon as they start doing that to the first few people, what's going to stop everyone else from instantly sending their bitcoin to family and friends across the border for safe keeping?
  - qaq 5y ago
    So you or you child is being tortured but you are "happy" that your bitcoins are safe ? This whole thing omits the question of how a person under oppressive regime came into possession of bitcoin in the first place
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      It's more a matter of game theory. With wealth like gold, land, oil, or any other physical resources, an oppressive regime can just kill all dissenters and take control of everything. The payoff to violence is huge. But with a digital wealth like bitcoin, which can flee the country at the speed of light, even if the owners can't go with it, the payoff to violence evaporates. The oppressive regime that spends a lot of time and energy torturing and killing people will have no spoils to show for it.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        Except who is buying it and for what? The only wealth people could offer for Bitcoin is wealth in a country with an oppressive regime. Who internationally can even take possession of that to cover their expenses? The only plausible option would be to actually just setup a mining rig and mine the Bitcoin, since presumably for a while their might be an electricity grid their and the BTC network ascribes value to that activity...except you can't mine on commodity hardware to anymore either.
deleted 5y ago
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justapassenger 5y ago
I find it very manipulative to use people suffering as an excuse to pump speculative assets. Sure, there’s very tiny amount of people who use Bitcoin as you described. But so there’re people who get benefits from smoking.
- glenvdb 5y ago
  I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare that to smoking. As the article states, check your financial privilege. And "tiny amount of people"? What's "tiny" here? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?
  - lalaland1125 5y ago
    > Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?
    - glenvdb 5y ago
      Not exactly, no. But I wasn't the one assigning a vague description of "size" to the number of people that use it that way, was I?
    - glenvdb 5y ago
      But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adoption-index https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop... It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        That link plays fast and loose with stats making any actual analysis impossible. "We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita" Weigh how? "we rank countries by their P2P trade volume and weight it to favor countries with lower PPP per capita and fewer internet users" Weigh how? How do you get the numbers on internet users? "We rank all 154 countries according to each of those three metrics, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all three, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1" What? It's not a methodology conductive to analysis. Is a hodge-podge of smart sounding words that create pretty graphs. Oh, and they changed the methodology this year, but still compare results to previous years that used the old methodology. Very scientific
MelonTree 5y ago
I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral damage -- I had done nothing to piss off any of the powers to be. It made me quickly appreciate that a persons ability to transact while not quite a human right, isn't too far from it either. There is no way the government (or financial world) should hold the power to wreck someone with no accountability. Bitcoin as I see it, is a way to shift the balance of power somewhere closer to where it belongs. I don't hold bitcoin because I think it'll go up in value, I hold it because I don't want someone to tell me I can't pay rent because ... well they can't tell me why, because "sorry, I don't have access to that information"
- pishpash 5y ago
  Wouldn't that only work if you had places (like your landlord) taking Bitcoin off the blockchain directly for payment? Otherwise, transacting still requires the cooperation of intermediaries subject to sanctions. Maybe you can launder through a friend, but... it doesn't seem any easier.
  - MelonTree 5y ago
    It's massively easier. If at the time I had my money in bitcoin, I would just need to find willing trader (someone who would trade my bitcoin for making my rent payment). But because I didn't, and my bank account was frozen, I had to find someone to pay my rent _on credit_. I was lucky to have someone to turn to, I suspect not everyone is fortunate to have friends who are willing and able to help and trust someone with a frozen bank account. And what also is scary, if I had been a real target and not bycatch, I bet anyone who helped me would've also faced the same asset freeze for helping me.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    With localbitcoin and similar exchanges you can convert the btc to usd peer to peer with strangers.
cemerick 5y ago
"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven. You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy. (Of course, if this is incorrect, surely there are hundreds, at least dozens of compelling case studies by now?)
- rabuse 5y ago
  Venezuela
  - cemerick 5y ago
    Perfect example, thank you. Given the typical wage in Venezuela of late, someone looking to exfiltrate their "wealth" there would be looking at working weeks if not months to afford a single typical BTC transaction fee. Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.
    - phreack 5y ago
      One way people have of affording these fees is by working for people outside the country who can pay a salary that would cover the fees alongside being a living wage. After building enough wealth in crypto, they can choose to leave the regime in better terms than as a refugee. This has happened many many times already, this is the most valuable use case for crypto in practice.
    - esosac 5y ago
      i don't think you know what the typical wage in venezuela is. i do because i live here. you can watch this video if you want to know (it's not 3$ a month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4 say i've happened to save 1000$ and i want to leave the country and i don't want the police near the airport to take my money as they're known to do. do you think it would be an absolute fantasy for me to find some way to sell my 1000$ for bitcoin and buy them again somewhere else?
lalaland1125 5y ago
The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties. The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network. And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have. Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US.
- louloulou 5y ago
  Inflation protection for long-term savings is a huge use case.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    When people stop buying the latest and greatest machines for Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's price will crash to zero. It will trigger double-spending attacks, which will undermine trust in the network. Gold doesn't have this problem; so gold is better. Gold has been used to store value for thousands of years, while Bitcoin is a new and experimental technology. It's absurd to say that you would use an experimental technology to store long-term wealth. Maybe once it's tried and proven, fine. But right now it's inefficient, volatile, has high fees, and has got the problem with mining I talked about above. For clarity: My comments above are directly relevant to the comment above about inflation. Guarding against inflation is about holding onto your wealth for the long term. I was comparing Bitcoin to gold for that purpose -- which is entirely valid.
    - Gosper 5y ago
      > When people stop buying the latest and greatest machines for Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's price will crash to zero. It will trigger double-spending attacks, which will undermine trust in the network. Gold doesn't have this problem; so gold is better. Nope, you're laboring under a misapprehension. Even if all new compute power stopped being manufactured miners will run their existing equipment. The mining difficulty will plateau and overtime gently decrease as equipment breaks. Older and less efficient (at computing double SHA-256) equipment can be profitably brought online where the price of electricity to do so is available and other more valuable uses of that energy in that locale are not possible. You can ride this all the way back down the years and generations of ASICs then GPUs to CPUs. Once humanity is out of CPUs, well, we'll have more pressing issues. We'll talk again then, or not. Yes, mining and securing the network nevermind transmitting transactions would be difficult with ink, paper, and abacus technology alone. I'd expect gold to hold some value here despite difficulty in securing and assaying it restricting its useble value to technical specialists and institutions. Nonperishable food, water filters, consumable entertaining substances, etc. would be a better bet if you're prepping against a Mad Max level of collapse.
pishpash 5y ago
To begin with this assumes a refugee with substantial enough assets to transmit abroad. Before Bitcoin such people paid a bribe to get those assets out. Now they pay some broker a purchase fee and withstand the market volatility. A big loss either way.
cerved 5y ago
The point of the article is that this is that people don't invest in Bitcoin because it's great refuge money. They expect prices to rise.
- satoshiiii 5y ago
  I invested in BTC years ago because of those 2, I expected the value to grow as adoption grows. And BTC seems to me back then that it was a great way to store my hard earned money and I can bring it with me anywhere safely.
TawandaMoyo 5y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. People have different reasons why they believe in bitcoin (and other cryptos). Where I live the government has in the past 20 years wiped out citizens' savings at least 3 times, arbitrarily, without any notice. In such a situation using bitcoin, regardless of the risk/skepticism, is a far better alternative than having all your money disappear on the whims and or experiments of politicians. Once I get sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptos I will happily take my chances, and I'm sure many in my situation will see it that way.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  It's sad to hear this. Is there no way for you to buy foreign currency like dollars instead? Bitcoin might be an attractive asset to speculate in, but I'm not sure if it's the safest way to hold onto your wealth, because of its inefficiency, volatility, the need for endless mining to sustain it, and so on. It might multiply your wealth by 10 or reduce it to zero -- do you really want to take the risk? I understand that what I'm saying might be boring, but foreign currency is tried and truer.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    They're different risks from holding dollars. If safety is your top priority, you won't go 100% into fiat.
  - glenvdb 5y ago
    The only thing fiat currency across the world has proven is that it's subject to the whims of bureaucrats and has the theft of inflation built-in. Even the "best" fiat in the world like GBP and USD have seen their purchasing reduced drastically over the decades. I don't trust politicians to manage their money or economy well. But I do trust code and math that enforces decentralised consensus that can't be manipulated by a handful of powerful people. Some have tried in Bitcoin's short 12 year history, and they've all failed. You say Bitcoin is inefficient. In comparison to what? By what measures? If you compare Bitcoin to gold mining it uses less energy. https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons If you compare it to the legacy financial system (and many other industries), it also uses less energy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-compare-industry https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp... You say Bitcoin is volatile, but that is to be expected for a new form of money that people are still trying to figure out the value of. How long do you think it took for gold to reach a stable point of perceived value over its long history? Bitcoin is only 12 years old. But perhaps calling it "volatile" isn't really even fair to begin with, when you compare it to top stocks and gold. https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing-corrections https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing... Need for endless mining? Of course it's endless, it's a vital part of network security in an adversarial environment. As the network stores more value the energy expenditure will need to go up to secure it. This is true of any other store of value. Gold is not only incredibly expensive to mine, it's expensive to secure in large facilities. The more Bitcoin integrates into the economy and the more wealth it secures, the more energy expenditure it should use. This is by design and a good thing. And if you compare it to other industries (linked above), it is far more efficient than current systems. Forget "crypto". Most of them are varying degrees of scam or cargo-culting around "blockchain technology" (including Ethereum). Bitcoin is the only one that matters because it's truly neutral and decentralised. It wasn't founded by any company, there's no marketing team or CEO. It's just an open network protocol that people choose to opt-in to because they understand its value proposition to the world. In the same way that there's a separation of church and state, there needs to be a separation of money and state. https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Bitcoin is not private. It's probably even easier to trace than traditional bank accounts. There are better projects focused on privacy. Monero, for example.
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markdown 5y ago
> The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regimes. A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else, and access their Bitcoin without the risk of it being confiscated during the journey, because they can simply memorise the seed phrase (24 words). LOL, who in those countries would sell them bitcoin? You've pulled out an argument I see all the time about the utility of bitcoin, but you can always just tell that it's made by someone who's never lived under an oppressive regime. It's a first-worlders idea of what thirdworlders can do.
- glenvdb 5y ago
  Alex Gladstein has written about this at length. He works for the Human Rights Foundation and advocates Bitcoin for its humanitarian use cases. He has spoken to many people in these types of countries to get their take on it. See for yourself... https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein
  - markdown 5y ago
    I live in one of those countries. Nobody will accept my currency in exchange for bitcoin. I can't send money offshore to buy bitcoin. I mean, just ask the Chinese how easy it is to get bitcoin today. The billionaires, millionaires, and political elite can get their hands on bitcoin sure no matter where in the world they are, but not the common man (the actual oppressed in those regimes). Unlike Alex, I don't have a conflict of interest.
XorNot 5y ago
> A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else Problem: Who is selling Bitcoin for local currency in an area where there is a problem which is generating refugees? Sure - you can electronically send Bitcoin to people, but how is the seller going to receive local currency from a war torn region without being local themselves? And if they are local...why are they selling their Bitcoin? Remember - this is an area presumably in some form of collapse. How is a refugee going to transact their savings to another party who can accept them safely in the first place (rather then say, just being robbed - presumably why they're fleeing).
rglullis 5y ago
Stolfi was my professor at Unicamp and has become a somewhat famous buttcoiner. His laundry list of arguments always depend in this "let them have cake" mentality of people living in a world of functioning institutions. It is almost ironic how someone who lived through all the economic instability in Brazil never bothered to look at the practical reasons that lead to people holding BTC. With that said, each day that goes by I am more inclined to agree with him in relation to Bitcoin and all projects that tout "fixed supply", "store of value", PoW crap. I agree that the unbanked and people that fear persecution or censorship can benefit from crypttocurrencies. The part where I don't agree anymore is these people have BTC as their best alternative to protect their wealth or to be sovereign over their finances.
oh_sigh 5y ago
How exactly does a refugee convert their wealth to bitcoin before leaving their country?

qaq 5y ago

Generally people participating in a Ponzi scheme do not view it as such. The tactics deployed by truly oppressive regimes make anything easy to confiscate including bitcoin.

glenvdb 5y ago
Yes, the wrench technique will always ultimately win. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ But they have to know someone holds it in the first place. You can walk around with a seed phrase in your head and no one would know.
- qaq 5y ago
  well you had to have something of value that you had to trade for bitcoin. Also in oppressive regimes the act of attempting to leave the country already makes you a suspect.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    > the act of attempting to leave the country They aren't going to immediately execute everyone who is crossing the border. Even in authoritarian regimes, some people may be able to leave, and borders are not completely shutdown. And in that situation, for those people, it is useful to be able to carry money, in a way where they do not know that you have it.
    - bb88 5y ago
      I mean sure, some people make it out of North Korea. A lot are publicly executed to be made an example of too. I think you fail to understand the power of a true authoritarian government, particularly if they can monitor and limit your access to the outside world. * Use a VPN, you're guilty of Treason. * Use a currency other than the North Korean won, you're guilty of treason. * Use an electronic device other than state sponsored devices, you're guilty of treason. All executions will be recorded for posterity and broadcast to the people as a reminder of the power of the state.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- abecedarius 5y ago
  Also don't forget multisig or Shamir secret sharing.
deleted 5y ago
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anonporridge 5y ago
True, sufficiently oppressive regimes can confiscate bitcoin in a lot of situations. However, as soon as they start doing that to the first few people, what's going to stop everyone else from instantly sending their bitcoin to family and friends across the border for safe keeping?
- qaq 5y ago
  So you or you child is being tortured but you are "happy" that your bitcoins are safe ? This whole thing omits the question of how a person under oppressive regime came into possession of bitcoin in the first place
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    It's more a matter of game theory. With wealth like gold, land, oil, or any other physical resources, an oppressive regime can just kill all dissenters and take control of everything. The payoff to violence is huge. But with a digital wealth like bitcoin, which can flee the country at the speed of light, even if the owners can't go with it, the payoff to violence evaporates. The oppressive regime that spends a lot of time and energy torturing and killing people will have no spoils to show for it.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Except who is buying it and for what? The only wealth people could offer for Bitcoin is wealth in a country with an oppressive regime. Who internationally can even take possession of that to cover their expenses? The only plausible option would be to actually just setup a mining rig and mine the Bitcoin, since presumably for a while their might be an electricity grid their and the BTC network ascribes value to that activity...except you can't mine on commodity hardware to anymore either.

deleted 5y ago

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justapassenger 5y ago

I find it very manipulative to use people suffering as an excuse to pump speculative assets. Sure, there’s very tiny amount of people who use Bitcoin as you described. But so there’re people who get benefits from smoking.

glenvdb 5y ago
I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare that to smoking. As the article states, check your financial privilege. And "tiny amount of people"? What's "tiny" here? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  > Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?
  - glenvdb 5y ago
    Not exactly, no. But I wasn't the one assigning a vague description of "size" to the number of people that use it that way, was I?
  - glenvdb 5y ago
    But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adoption-index https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop... It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      That link plays fast and loose with stats making any actual analysis impossible. "We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita" Weigh how? "we rank countries by their P2P trade volume and weight it to favor countries with lower PPP per capita and fewer internet users" Weigh how? How do you get the numbers on internet users? "We rank all 154 countries according to each of those three metrics, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all three, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1" What? It's not a methodology conductive to analysis. Is a hodge-podge of smart sounding words that create pretty graphs. Oh, and they changed the methodology this year, but still compare results to previous years that used the old methodology. Very scientific

MelonTree 5y ago

I got involved in bitcoin after being blackballed from the (US) financial world while for 2-3 months while I was "investigated" in the most dystopianly opaque way possible. One day I lost the ability to transact. A few months later I got it back. Had it not been for good friends who could cover my expenses, I could have easily ended up homeless. And the most shocking part of it all, was that I was merely collateral damage -- I had done nothing to piss off any of the powers to be. It made me quickly appreciate that a persons ability to transact while not quite a human right, isn't too far from it either. There is no way the government (or financial world) should hold the power to wreck someone with no accountability. Bitcoin as I see it, is a way to shift the balance of power somewhere closer to where it belongs. I don't hold bitcoin because I think it'll go up in value, I hold it because I don't want someone to tell me I can't pay rent because ... well they can't tell me why, because "sorry, I don't have access to that information"

pishpash 5y ago
Wouldn't that only work if you had places (like your landlord) taking Bitcoin off the blockchain directly for payment? Otherwise, transacting still requires the cooperation of intermediaries subject to sanctions. Maybe you can launder through a friend, but... it doesn't seem any easier.
- MelonTree 5y ago
  It's massively easier. If at the time I had my money in bitcoin, I would just need to find willing trader (someone who would trade my bitcoin for making my rent payment). But because I didn't, and my bank account was frozen, I had to find someone to pay my rent _on credit_. I was lucky to have someone to turn to, I suspect not everyone is fortunate to have friends who are willing and able to help and trust someone with a frozen bank account. And what also is scary, if I had been a real target and not bycatch, I bet anyone who helped me would've also faced the same asset freeze for helping me.
- reidjs 5y ago
  With localbitcoin and similar exchanges you can convert the btc to usd peer to peer with strangers.

cemerick 5y ago

"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven. You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a blinkered fantasy. (Of course, if this is incorrect, surely there are hundreds, at least dozens of compelling case studies by now?)

rabuse 5y ago
Venezuela
- cemerick 5y ago
  Perfect example, thank you. Given the typical wage in Venezuela of late, someone looking to exfiltrate their "wealth" there would be looking at working weeks if not months to afford a single typical BTC transaction fee. Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.
  - phreack 5y ago
    One way people have of affording these fees is by working for people outside the country who can pay a salary that would cover the fees alongside being a living wage. After building enough wealth in crypto, they can choose to leave the regime in better terms than as a refugee. This has happened many many times already, this is the most valuable use case for crypto in practice.
  - esosac 5y ago
    i don't think you know what the typical wage in venezuela is. i do because i live here. you can watch this video if you want to know (it's not 3$ a month): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br7aSAXcPW4 say i've happened to save 1000$ and i want to leave the country and i don't want the police near the airport to take my money as they're known to do. do you think it would be an absolute fantasy for me to find some way to sell my 1000$ for bitcoin and buy them again somewhere else?

lalaland1125 5y ago

The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties. The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network. And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have. Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US.

louloulou 5y ago
Inflation protection for long-term savings is a huge use case.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  When people stop buying the latest and greatest machines for Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's price will crash to zero. It will trigger double-spending attacks, which will undermine trust in the network. Gold doesn't have this problem; so gold is better. Gold has been used to store value for thousands of years, while Bitcoin is a new and experimental technology. It's absurd to say that you would use an experimental technology to store long-term wealth. Maybe once it's tried and proven, fine. But right now it's inefficient, volatile, has high fees, and has got the problem with mining I talked about above. For clarity: My comments above are directly relevant to the comment above about inflation. Guarding against inflation is about holding onto your wealth for the long term. I was comparing Bitcoin to gold for that purpose -- which is entirely valid.
  - Gosper 5y ago
    > When people stop buying the latest and greatest machines for Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's price will crash to zero. It will trigger double-spending attacks, which will undermine trust in the network. Gold doesn't have this problem; so gold is better. Nope, you're laboring under a misapprehension. Even if all new compute power stopped being manufactured miners will run their existing equipment. The mining difficulty will plateau and overtime gently decrease as equipment breaks. Older and less efficient (at computing double SHA-256) equipment can be profitably brought online where the price of electricity to do so is available and other more valuable uses of that energy in that locale are not possible. You can ride this all the way back down the years and generations of ASICs then GPUs to CPUs. Once humanity is out of CPUs, well, we'll have more pressing issues. We'll talk again then, or not. Yes, mining and securing the network nevermind transmitting transactions would be difficult with ink, paper, and abacus technology alone. I'd expect gold to hold some value here despite difficulty in securing and assaying it restricting its useble value to technical specialists and institutions. Nonperishable food, water filters, consumable entertaining substances, etc. would be a better bet if you're prepping against a Mad Max level of collapse.

pishpash 5y ago

To begin with this assumes a refugee with substantial enough assets to transmit abroad. Before Bitcoin such people paid a bribe to get those assets out. Now they pay some broker a purchase fee and withstand the market volatility. A big loss either way.

cerved 5y ago

The point of the article is that this is that people don't invest in Bitcoin because it's great refuge money. They expect prices to rise.

satoshiiii 5y ago
I invested in BTC years ago because of those 2, I expected the value to grow as adoption grows. And BTC seems to me back then that it was a great way to store my hard earned money and I can bring it with me anywhere safely.

TawandaMoyo 5y ago

Thanks for pointing this out. People have different reasons why they believe in bitcoin (and other cryptos). Where I live the government has in the past 20 years wiped out citizens' savings at least 3 times, arbitrarily, without any notice. In such a situation using bitcoin, regardless of the risk/skepticism, is a far better alternative than having all your money disappear on the whims and or experiments of politicians. Once I get sufficiently knowledgeable about cryptos I will happily take my chances, and I'm sure many in my situation will see it that way.

ogogmad 5y ago
It's sad to hear this. Is there no way for you to buy foreign currency like dollars instead? Bitcoin might be an attractive asset to speculate in, but I'm not sure if it's the safest way to hold onto your wealth, because of its inefficiency, volatility, the need for endless mining to sustain it, and so on. It might multiply your wealth by 10 or reduce it to zero -- do you really want to take the risk? I understand that what I'm saying might be boring, but foreign currency is tried and truer.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  They're different risks from holding dollars. If safety is your top priority, you won't go 100% into fiat.
- glenvdb 5y ago
  The only thing fiat currency across the world has proven is that it's subject to the whims of bureaucrats and has the theft of inflation built-in. Even the "best" fiat in the world like GBP and USD have seen their purchasing reduced drastically over the decades. I don't trust politicians to manage their money or economy well. But I do trust code and math that enforces decentralised consensus that can't be manipulated by a handful of powerful people. Some have tried in Bitcoin's short 12 year history, and they've all failed. You say Bitcoin is inefficient. In comparison to what? By what measures? If you compare Bitcoin to gold mining it uses less energy. https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons If you compare it to the legacy financial system (and many other industries), it also uses less energy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-compare-industry https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp... You say Bitcoin is volatile, but that is to be expected for a new form of money that people are still trying to figure out the value of. How long do you think it took for gold to reach a stable point of perceived value over its long history? Bitcoin is only 12 years old. But perhaps calling it "volatile" isn't really even fair to begin with, when you compare it to top stocks and gold. https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing-corrections https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing... Need for endless mining? Of course it's endless, it's a vital part of network security in an adversarial environment. As the network stores more value the energy expenditure will need to go up to secure it. This is true of any other store of value. Gold is not only incredibly expensive to mine, it's expensive to secure in large facilities. The more Bitcoin integrates into the economy and the more wealth it secures, the more energy expenditure it should use. This is by design and a good thing. And if you compare it to other industries (linked above), it is far more efficient than current systems. Forget "crypto". Most of them are varying degrees of scam or cargo-culting around "blockchain technology" (including Ethereum). Bitcoin is the only one that matters because it's truly neutral and decentralised. It wasn't founded by any company, there's no marketing team or CEO. It's just an open network protocol that people choose to opt-in to because they understand its value proposition to the world. In the same way that there's a separation of church and state, there needs to be a separation of money and state. https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Bitcoin is not private. It's probably even easier to trace than traditional bank accounts. There are better projects focused on privacy. Monero, for example.

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markdown 5y ago

> The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regimes. A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else, and access their Bitcoin without the risk of it being confiscated during the journey, because they can simply memorise the seed phrase (24 words). LOL, who in those countries would sell them bitcoin? You've pulled out an argument I see all the time about the utility of bitcoin, but you can always just tell that it's made by someone who's never lived under an oppressive regime. It's a first-worlders idea of what thirdworlders can do.

glenvdb 5y ago
Alex Gladstein has written about this at length. He works for the Human Rights Foundation and advocates Bitcoin for its humanitarian use cases. He has spoken to many people in these types of countries to get their take on it. See for yourself... https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein
- markdown 5y ago
  I live in one of those countries. Nobody will accept my currency in exchange for bitcoin. I can't send money offshore to buy bitcoin. I mean, just ask the Chinese how easy it is to get bitcoin today. The billionaires, millionaires, and political elite can get their hands on bitcoin sure no matter where in the world they are, but not the common man (the actual oppressed in those regimes). Unlike Alex, I don't have a conflict of interest.

XorNot 5y ago

> A refugee could store their wealth in Bitcoin, leave their country, settle somewhere else Problem: Who is selling Bitcoin for local currency in an area where there is a problem which is generating refugees? Sure - you can electronically send Bitcoin to people, but how is the seller going to receive local currency from a war torn region without being local themselves? And if they are local...why are they selling their Bitcoin? Remember - this is an area presumably in some form of collapse. How is a refugee going to transact their savings to another party who can accept them safely in the first place (rather then say, just being robbed - presumably why they're fleeing).

rglullis 5y ago

Stolfi was my professor at Unicamp and has become a somewhat famous buttcoiner. His laundry list of arguments always depend in this "let them have cake" mentality of people living in a world of functioning institutions. It is almost ironic how someone who lived through all the economic instability in Brazil never bothered to look at the practical reasons that lead to people holding BTC. With that said, each day that goes by I am more inclined to agree with him in relation to Bitcoin and all projects that tout "fixed supply", "store of value", PoW crap. I agree that the unbanked and people that fear persecution or censorship can benefit from crypttocurrencies. The part where I don't agree anymore is these people have BTC as their best alternative to protect their wealth or to be sovereign over their finances.

oh_sigh 5y ago

How exactly does a refugee convert their wealth to bitcoin before leaving their country?