17 ms·

Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

64 points by mrry 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
This post is a fairly good model for the kind of communication that firms should have about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, etc. It's a good counterpoint to this one https://terminusdb.com/blog/were-we-wrong-about-web3/ https://terminusdb.com/blog/were-we-wrong-about-web3/
seibelj 5y ago
Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.
- dagmx 5y ago
  How do you back that up? Do you exclude all the fiat currency backed resources sent to help Ukraine? Do you also exclude the crypto workarounds to sanctions on Russia that can keep the war prolonged?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    US sent $500 million worth of actual hardware, the value of that is more than the crypto donations received so far.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      There were also a few celebrities who's contribution put together is more than the crypto donations. The Dutch raised more than $100m which is still more than the crypto total
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Source?
  - seibelj 5y ago
    https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-cryptocurrency-technology-business-bitcoin-812902c5dd1474692be3d8d040ba7bda https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-cryptocurrency-tec... > “It’s certainly a first,” said Bennett Tomlin, who investigates cryptocurrency scams and hosts the podcast Crypto Critic’s Corner. “We’ve never seen a sovereign nation fund their defense efforts in crypto before. It does prove out a lot of the crypto argument.”
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      Tbat's $67,000,000 USD up to March 26th. Just to compare about $400,000,000 had been given via normal means by March 12th[1]. Sure every bit helps, but we're still talking different orders of magnitude. [1 ]https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/na-pidtrimku-armiyi-ta-gumanitarnu-dopomogu-zibrano-blizko-116-mlrd-grn https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/na-pidtrimku-armiyi-ta-guman...
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      This doesn’t support your claim…
- shafyy 5y ago
  Nonsense. Sending USD or EUR (or any other currency) to Ukraine is very simple. You can go to their funding page, enter your credit card, and you're done. Then they've got money they can actually use. What are they doing with all the crypto? Did they convert it to fiat? Is it just sitting there? The only reason so many cryptos were sent is because there a lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass I'm also assuming those donors will try to write off their crypto at imaginary prices and hope the IRS doesn't notice.
    - everfree 5y ago
      Why would you think that's likely?
  - mprovost 5y ago
    Maybe they meant the effort on the other side of the war? The side that has been cut off from the international finance system...
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. No. Crypto sent a bunch of meaningless novelty coins to a country that has no chance in hell of converting them into food, water, transportation etc.
  - everfree 5y ago
    If that's true, then why did their government solicit people to send them these "meaningless novelty coins" on social media? Just for fun?
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      No idea. Perhaps grabbing at straws.
      - everfree 5y ago
        I just looked up the donation address on the blockchain, and it looks like Ukraine sent some of it directly to a crypto exchange to cash out. Perhaps Ukraine isn't the one grasping at straws here.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        "Some of it" is how much? Out of the "omg we sent 100 million dollars to Ukraine"? How many exchanges will actually be able to cash out that amount of money?
        everfree 5y ago
        I don't have time to do the chain analysis right now, but it looks like they cashed out the equivalent of at least mid-7-figures USD, possibly much more. Trace the transactions yourself, here's the analytics for their receiving address. https://etherscan.io/address/0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F9358d18A45e14 https://etherscan.io/address/0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F93... That amount of money is easy to cash out even on a relatively small exchange.
reactspa 5y ago
It's one of the most financially *exclusionary* concepts ever created. There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. Aside 1: as big of a joke the original dotcom boom was, it looks serious compared to web3's $200,0000 floor price jpeg apes. Aside 2: I read this week about a couple of people losing their jpeg apes because they connected their wallet to some scam site. I thought web3 was supposed to be smarter than "connecting one's wallet to a non-scam site in a way that allows the non-scam site to scam you if they wanted." Is this the best they can do? I was told we'd be connecting our wallets to everything in the future.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  The smartest system still can't protect the dumbest users from themselves. Not a bug imo
  - oblio 5y ago
    It couldn't protect freaking Ethereum creators from themselves.
- everfree 5y ago
  > There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. Sounds just like the VC land-grab when investing in a hot new tech startup, and the subsequent dumping on the public at ICO. But just like with stocks, nobody "needs" to buy crypto. If a company produces something useful to you, you can capture value as a customer without owning the stock. If a company ever uses blockchain technology to produce something useful to you, at that point you will be able to capture value as a customer without owning crypto. > The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. It's easy to create an infinite number of companies, but not all company stocks trade at the same value.
k__ 5y ago
Onboarding is really a PITA. Until you found a way to pay for everything in crypto, you have to deal with centralized exchanges to get fiat to pay your stuff. Playing in fiat requires you to convert from a crypto token and that is a taxable event. It's a bit like shooting stuff into space. Getting out of earth's gravity is the hardest part, even if it's just a small fraction of the way.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency as legal tender so people don't have to stress about capital gains implications with each and every transaction they do, and get fucked if they ever lose their accounting history and get audited. It will be interesting to see how things develop in El Salvador now that they have legally enabled this circular economy to develop with bitcoin, and spending is not a taxable event.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.
    - rattlesnakedave 5y ago
      I don’t think this matters. Wallets can convert between the two trivially. Acceptance as a method of payment is what matters. What matters more is acceptance as a method of savings.
      - 5y ago
_vvhw 5y ago
"We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money." "At Wave, though, we prefer to use boring technology, and a simple relational database like Postgres does an equally good job at this." How does Wave ensure multi-region durability for Postgres, high availability, and strict serializability during failover, without risk of split-brain in the presence of network partitions? I'm also interested in Wave's storage fault model with regards to Postgres? How are misdirected reads/writes, lost reads/writes, corruption in the middle of the WAL, and corruption at the end of the WAL handled? To ensure that account balances and transactions are never lost? As far as I understand, Postgres does not provide too many guarantees when it comes to interesting disk failures? I don't mean to advocate for cryptocurrency in any way. I'm genuinely curious, because I would have thought that a more modern distributed database that guarantees strict serializability in the face of network partitions would be the more obvious choice for tracking account balances safely?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  > multi-region durability Why is this important? Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync, plus failover when the main server goes down? It seems to me that all of your questions are issues that have been often discussed over the last 20 years, and they all have well known answers, except perhaps "multi-region durability". Leave that out, and you've well known answers for your other questions. And it seems to me, what they are saying is that they found it easier to go with a boring and traditional setup, that is, a boring and traditional setup is easier than any other setup.
  - _vvhw 5y ago
    "Why is this important?" Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire. "Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync" Because without distributed strict serializability, Wave would also be risking the loss of data back to the last backup. However, I'm assuming here that Wave are running consensus around Postgres. That they're not taking any of these chances. But if they're doing it right, then Postgres just doesn't seem like the most boring way to get distributed failover safely, especially when the data is as valuable as account balances, where so much compliance is at stake. Why not simply use a distributed database to begin with?
valcron1000 5y ago
Yet another middle man stating that crypto is not the way to go. Of course they are going to say that, they lose their 1% transaction fee.
- loceng 5y ago
  Isn't the cost generally substantially higher than 1% if directly using the blockchain [depends on transaction size and urgency/timeliness I suppose]? But yes, you are right there is a competitive pressure/force at work here.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Some of that cost is externalized onto the environment and future, much like we don't pay the actual cost of fossil fuels at the pump.
  - valcron1000 5y ago
    I just made a 400 USDC transfer. I payed 1 USDC in fees.
    - knorker 5y ago
      I regularly make 5 digit USD transfers with no fees at all. But that's with fiat, so… They're also instant (seconds, maybe single digit minutes between banks), but that's because I'm in Europe.
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        And you were at the whim of the banks. They could confiscate your funds, lose the tx, reverse the payments, etc. You are missing what cryptocurrency is about. No banks. No middle man. No censorship. No do-overs. Personal responsibility for wealth. When a person says “but I can do x with bank” they have missed the entire point of the exercise.
        5y ago
agacera 5y ago
Dan Luu impact at Wave.com is noticable already. Since he joined in March, Wave is pushing one great blog post per week (in contrast to 1 in 2021, 0 in 2020 and 3 in 2019). I tried creating this culture of blogging but failed, would love to hear strategies that worked to achieve this.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Be a good writer to be able to recognize and hire good writers?
srsamarthyam 5y ago
it was never meant to
- knorker 5y ago
  And so it goes for all cryptocurrency selling points. But just to be clear, in case others have not heard: It's definitely being sold as financial inclusion.
mkdirp 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money. This is the same argument as above. > We need to comply with relevant regulations—know-your-customer laws, capitalization requirements, account limits, etc. Not something cryptocurrencies have claimed they can solve. > We need to provide an easy way for users to exchange their balance for cash and vice versa. This is an implementation detail, and entirely depends on how the UX of the wallet is. Sure running a CLI tool and GUI that looks like it's from 2008 (at least it was last time I looked at bitcoin's GUI) isn't great UX, but you can build a different GUI for it. Something plenty of exchanges have already done. > Of course, the above aren’t the main use cases of cryptocurrency today: those are speculation, theft, extortion, more theft, drugs, even more theft, and speeding up climate change. It remains to be seen whether legitimate, productive uses of cryptocurrency will ever justify the hype. We hope so! There it is. This is just an article blindly bashing cryptocurrencies. I implore you to ask yourself, what has previously been used to do all the above? That's right. Fiat currencies such as the GBP, USD, and other currencies. I may possibly be biased, because, I certainly believe cryptocurrency has its place, though I don't believe it will replace fiat. But this article is just unnecessary fear mongering with zero merit.
- Retric 5y ago
  Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.
  - ilammy 5y ago
    > I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. Trust them to keep your money – yes, you can absolutely rely on that. Trust them to have “your” money back – that’s a taller order. But it it will be safe, sure. At least with cryptocurrency you don’t have to keep it at an exchange, while the governments are pushing for abolishing cash and keeping all the money in banks.
rattlesnakedave 5y ago
“ The importance of a smooth on-ramp is seriously underrated by cryptocurrency enthusiasts” This is either the most or second most discussed problem in the cryptocurrency space.
motohagiography 5y ago
That Senegalese fisherman, if he were in Kenya, Uganda, or Ghana is probably already using M-Pesa on his feature phone. The article seems to present "inclusion," to mean "supervision," which is actually pretty acurate in general, but that whole narrative is so insincere as to be uncanny. Wave is welcome to tilt at windmills, but they should also recognize that this kind of posturing deserves any pillorying it may get.
throwaway4good 5y ago
It is banking the unbanked ... russian oligarchs ...
- anonporridge 5y ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-31/ukraine-s-crypto-banker-describes-how-war-is-changing-his-life https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-31/ukraine-s...
freddealmeida 5y ago
this article is shit.
JanDietch 5y ago

64 points by mrry 5y ago

This post is a fairly good model for the kind of communication that firms should have about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, etc. It's a good counterpoint to this one https://terminusdb.com/blog/were-we-wrong-about-web3/ https://terminusdb.com/blog/were-we-wrong-about-web3/

seibelj 5y ago

Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. I don't even need to list a million other counter points that have been posted to every HN crypto post since time immemorial, but that was a de-facto benefit of crypto over legacy finance.

dagmx 5y ago
How do you back that up? Do you exclude all the fiat currency backed resources sent to help Ukraine? Do you also exclude the crypto workarounds to sanctions on Russia that can keep the war prolonged?
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  US sent $500 million worth of actual hardware, the value of that is more than the crypto donations received so far.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    There were also a few celebrities who's contribution put together is more than the crypto donations. The Dutch raised more than $100m which is still more than the crypto total
endisneigh 5y ago
Source?
- seibelj 5y ago
  https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-cryptocurrency-technology-business-bitcoin-812902c5dd1474692be3d8d040ba7bda https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-cryptocurrency-tec... > “It’s certainly a first,” said Bennett Tomlin, who investigates cryptocurrency scams and hosts the podcast Crypto Critic’s Corner. “We’ve never seen a sovereign nation fund their defense efforts in crypto before. It does prove out a lot of the crypto argument.”
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Tbat's $67,000,000 USD up to March 26th. Just to compare about $400,000,000 had been given via normal means by March 12th[1]. Sure every bit helps, but we're still talking different orders of magnitude. [1 ]https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/na-pidtrimku-armiyi-ta-gumanitarnu-dopomogu-zibrano-blizko-116-mlrd-grn https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/na-pidtrimku-armiyi-ta-guman...
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    This doesn’t support your claim…
shafyy 5y ago
Nonsense. Sending USD or EUR (or any other currency) to Ukraine is very simple. You can go to their funding page, enter your credit card, and you're done. Then they've got money they can actually use. What are they doing with all the crypto? Did they convert it to fiat? Is it just sitting there? The only reason so many cryptos were sent is because there a lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > lot of people who don't know what to do with their cryptos, they can't use it for anything and liquidating large amounts of crypto is a pain in the ass I'm also assuming those donors will try to write off their crypto at imaginary prices and hope the IRS doesn't notice.
  - everfree 5y ago
    Why would you think that's likely?
- mprovost 5y ago
  Maybe they meant the effort on the other side of the war? The side that has been cut off from the international finance system...
dmitriid 5y ago
> Crypto crowdsourced the Ukrainian war effort faster and easier than the fiat rails did. No. Crypto sent a bunch of meaningless novelty coins to a country that has no chance in hell of converting them into food, water, transportation etc.
- everfree 5y ago
  If that's true, then why did their government solicit people to send them these "meaningless novelty coins" on social media? Just for fun?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    No idea. Perhaps grabbing at straws.
    - everfree 5y ago
      I just looked up the donation address on the blockchain, and it looks like Ukraine sent some of it directly to a crypto exchange to cash out. Perhaps Ukraine isn't the one grasping at straws here.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        "Some of it" is how much? Out of the "omg we sent 100 million dollars to Ukraine"? How many exchanges will actually be able to cash out that amount of money?
        everfree 5y ago
        I don't have time to do the chain analysis right now, but it looks like they cashed out the equivalent of at least mid-7-figures USD, possibly much more. Trace the transactions yourself, here's the analytics for their receiving address. https://etherscan.io/address/0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F9358d18A45e14 https://etherscan.io/address/0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F93... That amount of money is easy to cash out even on a relatively small exchange.

reactspa 5y ago

It's one of the most financially *exclusionary* concepts ever created. There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. Aside 1: as big of a joke the original dotcom boom was, it looks serious compared to web3's $200,0000 floor price jpeg apes. Aside 2: I read this week about a couple of people losing their jpeg apes because they connected their wallet to some scam site. I thought web3 was supposed to be smarter than "connecting one's wallet to a non-scam site in a way that allows the non-scam site to scam you if they wanted." Is this the best they can do? I was told we'd be connecting our wallets to everything in the future.

adamsmith143 5y ago
The smartest system still can't protect the dumbest users from themselves. Not a bug imo
- oblio 5y ago
  It couldn't protect freaking Ethereum creators from themselves.
everfree 5y ago
> There's a territory. There was digital land-grab on this territory. A tiny number of people bought all the available digital-land. Now everybody else needs to buy the land from them. At extortionate prices. Sounds just like the VC land-grab when investing in a hot new tech startup, and the subsequent dumping on the public at ICO. But just like with stocks, nobody "needs" to buy crypto. If a company produces something useful to you, you can capture value as a customer without owning the stock. If a company ever uses blockchain technology to produce something useful to you, at that point you will be able to capture value as a customer without owning crypto. > The good news? It's easy to create another territory. It's easy to create an infinite number of territories. It's easy to create an infinite number of companies, but not all company stocks trade at the same value.

k__ 5y ago

Onboarding is really a PITA. Until you found a way to pay for everything in crypto, you have to deal with centralized exchanges to get fiat to pay your stuff. Playing in fiat requires you to convert from a crypto token and that is a taxable event. It's a bit like shooting stuff into space. Getting out of earth's gravity is the hardest part, even if it's just a small fraction of the way.

anonporridge 5y ago
It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to create a circular economy where people pay and get paid in cryptocurrency, like you have within a nation state with their home currency. The creation of that circular economy without a monopoly on violence that forces everyone to converge on a single one is something that will happen in fits and starts. And of course, you still need policy change to treat the cryptocurrency as legal tender so people don't have to stress about capital gains implications with each and every transaction they do, and get fucked if they ever lose their accounting history and get audited. It will be interesting to see how things develop in El Salvador now that they have legally enabled this circular economy to develop with bitcoin, and spending is not a taxable event.
- verdverm 5y ago
  There is another problem, which is the unit of account. What currency are prices posted in? It's going to be very hard to displace fait on this front. I don't think cryptos can become this until they are as stable as existing currency. They aren't even used as currency or behave like one. More like gold or stocks and present.
  - rattlesnakedave 5y ago
    I don’t think this matters. Wallets can convert between the two trivially. Acceptance as a method of payment is what matters. What matters more is acceptance as a method of savings.
    - 5y ago

_vvhw 5y ago

"We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money." "At Wave, though, we prefer to use boring technology, and a simple relational database like Postgres does an equally good job at this." How does Wave ensure multi-region durability for Postgres, high availability, and strict serializability during failover, without risk of split-brain in the presence of network partitions? I'm also interested in Wave's storage fault model with regards to Postgres? How are misdirected reads/writes, lost reads/writes, corruption in the middle of the WAL, and corruption at the end of the WAL handled? To ensure that account balances and transactions are never lost? As far as I understand, Postgres does not provide too many guarantees when it comes to interesting disk failures? I don't mean to advocate for cryptocurrency in any way. I'm genuinely curious, because I would have thought that a more modern distributed database that guarantees strict serializability in the face of network partitions would be the more obvious choice for tracking account balances safely?

lkrubner 5y ago
> multi-region durability Why is this important? Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync, plus failover when the main server goes down? It seems to me that all of your questions are issues that have been often discussed over the last 20 years, and they all have well known answers, except perhaps "multi-region durability". Leave that out, and you've well known answers for your other questions. And it seems to me, what they are saying is that they found it easier to go with a boring and traditional setup, that is, a boring and traditional setup is easier than any other setup.
- _vvhw 5y ago
  "Why is this important?" Because without multi-region or multi-AZ durability, Wave could lose balances. For example, in the event of a DC fire. "Why can't they get by with a traditional main server plus some backups with a sync" Because without distributed strict serializability, Wave would also be risking the loss of data back to the last backup. However, I'm assuming here that Wave are running consensus around Postgres. That they're not taking any of these chances. But if they're doing it right, then Postgres just doesn't seem like the most boring way to get distributed failover safely, especially when the data is as valuable as account balances, where so much compliance is at stake. Why not simply use a distributed database to begin with?

valcron1000 5y ago

Yet another middle man stating that crypto is not the way to go. Of course they are going to say that, they lose their 1% transaction fee.

loceng 5y ago
Isn't the cost generally substantially higher than 1% if directly using the blockchain [depends on transaction size and urgency/timeliness I suppose]? But yes, you are right there is a competitive pressure/force at work here.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Some of that cost is externalized onto the environment and future, much like we don't pay the actual cost of fossil fuels at the pump.
- valcron1000 5y ago
  I just made a 400 USDC transfer. I payed 1 USDC in fees.
  - knorker 5y ago
    I regularly make 5 digit USD transfers with no fees at all. But that's with fiat, so… They're also instant (seconds, maybe single digit minutes between banks), but that's because I'm in Europe.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      And you were at the whim of the banks. They could confiscate your funds, lose the tx, reverse the payments, etc. You are missing what cryptocurrency is about. No banks. No middle man. No censorship. No do-overs. Personal responsibility for wealth. When a person says “but I can do x with bank” they have missed the entire point of the exercise.
      - 5y ago

agacera 5y ago

Dan Luu impact at Wave.com is noticable already. Since he joined in March, Wave is pushing one great blog post per week (in contrast to 1 in 2021, 0 in 2020 and 3 in 2019). I tried creating this culture of blogging but failed, would love to hear strategies that worked to achieve this.

dv_dt 5y ago
Be a good writer to be able to recognize and hire good writers?

srsamarthyam 5y ago

it was never meant to

knorker 5y ago
And so it goes for all cryptocurrency selling points. But just to be clear, in case others have not heard: It's definitely being sold as financial inclusion.

mkdirp 5y ago

Cryptocurrencies have never claimed they address the hardest parts of financial inclusion. Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of trust. > We need to keep track of our customers’ account balances. Right. That's what the blockchain is able to do. It can assert that you, who says you have 1 bitcoin in your wallet, actually really have 1 bitcoin in your wallet (assuming no attack vectors such as 51% attack). > We need them to trust that their Wave balance is correct and Wave won’t lose the money. This is the same argument as above. > We need to comply with relevant regulations—know-your-customer laws, capitalization requirements, account limits, etc. Not something cryptocurrencies have claimed they can solve. > We need to provide an easy way for users to exchange their balance for cash and vice versa. This is an implementation detail, and entirely depends on how the UX of the wallet is. Sure running a CLI tool and GUI that looks like it's from 2008 (at least it was last time I looked at bitcoin's GUI) isn't great UX, but you can build a different GUI for it. Something plenty of exchanges have already done. > Of course, the above aren’t the main use cases of cryptocurrency today: those are speculation, theft, extortion, more theft, drugs, even more theft, and speeding up climate change. It remains to be seen whether legitimate, productive uses of cryptocurrency will ever justify the hype. We hope so! There it is. This is just an article blindly bashing cryptocurrencies. I implore you to ask yourself, what has previously been used to do all the above? That's right. Fiat currencies such as the GBP, USD, and other currencies. I may possibly be biased, because, I certainly believe cryptocurrency has its place, though I don't believe it will replace fiat. But this article is just unnecessary fear mongering with zero merit.

Retric 5y ago
Trust is the biggest issue with cryptocurrency. I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, I can’t trust an exchange and keeping your own wallet is extremely risky.
- ilammy 5y ago
  > I can trust my bank + the government to keep my money safe. Trust them to keep your money – yes, you can absolutely rely on that. Trust them to have “your” money back – that’s a taller order. But it it will be safe, sure. At least with cryptocurrency you don’t have to keep it at an exchange, while the governments are pushing for abolishing cash and keeping all the money in banks.

rattlesnakedave 5y ago

“ The importance of a smooth on-ramp is seriously underrated by cryptocurrency enthusiasts” This is either the most or second most discussed problem in the cryptocurrency space.

motohagiography 5y ago

That Senegalese fisherman, if he were in Kenya, Uganda, or Ghana is probably already using M-Pesa on his feature phone. The article seems to present "inclusion," to mean "supervision," which is actually pretty acurate in general, but that whole narrative is so insincere as to be uncanny. Wave is welcome to tilt at windmills, but they should also recognize that this kind of posturing deserves any pillorying it may get.

throwaway4good 5y ago

It is banking the unbanked ... russian oligarchs ...

anonporridge 5y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-31/ukraine-s-crypto-banker-describes-how-war-is-changing-his-life https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-31/ukraine-s...

freddealmeida 5y ago

this article is shit.

JanDietch 5y ago