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People use crypto to make payments. I know because I invested in a European company that pays a lot of Argentinian developers in USDT. Further removing the link

• MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  You need SWIFT to get into and out of crypto, right? aka bank -> exchange/crypto (in/purchase) then sell crypto on exchange, transfer to bank
  • dannyw 4y ago
    Not if your landlord accepts crypto, also there's heaps of exchangers everywhere in Argentina.
  • noman-land 4y ago
    No you do not. You can get into crypto by selling things or working for it. And can get out of crypto by buying things or hiring people with it.
    • polygamous_bat 4y ago
      At some point in the chain, people need to get out of it. You buy food from grocery store who buys it from wholesaler who buys it from farmers, who could all be spread around the world. How is that feasible without worldwide adoption of USDT?
      • wongarsu 4y ago
        At small scale, you can meet up with someone at the coffee shop, you transfer the USDT, he hands you USD bills (this has been a real thing for a while). At large scale you can have large distributors that buy your USDT at an agreed price, and then sell it on either to other large companies or to a distribution network to the people who will at some point buy stuff from you for USDT. In the end it's a circular economy in a way, for anyone cashing out USDT there is someone cashing in (assuming the price stays constant). Right now we match them up with marketplaces and SWIFT transfers, but people running around with suitcases of cash would work just as well.
        • skohan 4y ago
          Surely you would agree that having crypto wired into the banking system inspires more confidence than “I give you a briefcase full of cash and you give me an entry in a ledger” You have to have an awful lot of trust that this briefcase full of cash will be available to train back should you ever want it again.
      • loveparade 4y ago
        That's a matter of adoption. These things move very slowly. If you look at the adoption of debit cards, it looks similar. They were first released in the 1960s, and most retailers fought against them and said they would never accept them. A few years ago there were valid technical reasons for why crypto is not being adopted by retailers in the form of slow transactions throughput and high fees. Nobody wants to wait a minute and spend $10 for their transaction to go through. These technical reasons no longer exist. L2s are extremely fast, secured by L1, and fees are small. And with the upcoming sharding upgrade Ethereum is going to be even more efficient. From a technical perspective, you could now accept USDT (or any other token) and have verification be about as fast as most card payments, with lower fees. But all of these are relatively recent developments (~1-2 years), and it will likely take a few years before all this technology trickles down into real-world adoption.
        • threeseed 4y ago
          The reason retailers don't like crypto is because: a) It is too volatile. b) Consumers are not demanding it. Not sure what the magical solution to either is that hasn't been tried before.
          • loveparade 4y ago
            1) Volatility is relative. USD Stablecoins are not volatile compared to the US dollar. It's the same. In other countries, the fiat currency is much more volatile than ETH or BTC. Like I mentioned above, 5+ years ago there was a push for retailers to adopt this stuff, but at the point stablecoins were not around, or unusable due to slow transactions or high fees. That's no longer the case. 2) True, I think the negative image and bad UX of retail crypto is a big reason of why retailers have not adopted it. I'm not sure this will continue forever though. 3) I would add that taxes are another reason retailers are vary of adopting crypto. Depending on the country, dealing with crypto taxes is a pain, and not worth the effort. The magical solution? It's time, competition, and the free market. If crypto is truly cheaper and easier to deal with, startups will push it onto retailers to replace credit card incumbents. But these things don't happen overnight.
          • 4y ago
• 8note 4y ago
  USDT's selling factor is that it's convertible to USD, no? The interesting thing I think is what happens to those USDT after the payment?
  • monero-xmr 4y ago
    I’m less familiar with Argentina than other countries. I know in Lebanon a lot of money changers will take crypto (Bitcoin / USDT primarily) and give you paper currency. There are a lot of money changers who earn a living this way. Very likely the same in Argentina.
    • HNArg024 4y ago
      Yep, pretty much the same here in Argentina. People are only now getting used to digital money (I don't mean cripto, I mean thinks like PayPal). Except for some places in Buenos Aires or online shops that sell contraband tech, you don't see widespread use of crypto. For us it's just a proxy for USD. Our currency is a joke (95% anual inflation) and we can only buy legally 200 USD month, so crypto is our way out.
    • 56friends 4y ago
      Do you call that "a true circular crypto economy"? Selling USDT to some shady changers on a grey market in Lebanon?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • fijiaarone 4y ago
      No street exchanger is going to take your cryptocurrency and give you money if they can’t get money back out of it.
      • monero-xmr 4y ago
        They typically send the crypto to a coworker in another country who cashes it out. Crypto has no borders
• netsharc 4y ago
  Are there a lot of Argentinian food stores that accept crypto? At the end of the chain, people need money to buy food to eat. Or are there "black market" exchanges that would accept a transfer into their digital wallet and pay out cash, so these Argentinians can buy bread?
  • HNArg024 4y ago
    We exchange crypto por Pesos in "black markets" and use the pesos to buy the everyday stuff. Larger transactions are almost always in USD (a car, a property), but it's harder to justify the funds. Most people getting paid in crypto aren't declaring any taxes. Even if you do, the limit for the most common method is 1k USD/month
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Exactly how it works in these countries. More and more of the economy is flowing through Black Market crypto dealers located in neighborhoods. The government takes a 50% tax on foreign cash coming in to convert to local currency, and once you do it you have to deal with 50% inflation. As a result there are black market crypto Banks. Someone will convert crypto for pesos to buy groceries at the crypto bank. The grocery store takes the peso they get and puts it back in the crypto Bank. Nobody wants hold the pesos any real time because it is a losing proposition. To put it in perspective, prior to crypto, people would take their entire paycheck and savings and immediately buy pallets of bricks for the same purpose. They would fill their houses and yards with these bricks because they held value better than the currency, even after accounting for the cost of trucking them around
• mrjin 4y ago
  I would expect the opposite. Argentinians do that coz Argentinian banks cannot be trusted(they learnt it from banks forced converting foreign currencies held in their acounts). But still, they will need to convert back to peso so that they can buy groceries etc.. Cutting the link will not make everyone accept crypto but leave it as none wants something cannot be freely converted if they have a choice. I guess the next move would be opening offshore accounts to accept payments.
  • redox99 4y ago
    If an Argentinian receives a SWIFT transfer of let's say 10k USD, it is forcefully converted to pesos at an absurdly bad, effectively asymmetrical exchange rate, basically less than 50% of the real value. In other words, if you try to buy dollars with the pesos that were converted for you, you will only be able to buy less than 5k USD. And that's before taking taxes into account. When taking taxes into account, somebody who is paid 10k will basically end up with 3k USD, probably less. Additionally, and this happens in every country, SWIFT takes days and fees are really expensive. Crypto is almost instant and fees much much lower.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • wongarsu 4y ago
    On the other hand, supermarkets don't accept USDT or Bitcoin because there's little benefit: it's easier to have their customers convert it to peso first. But if the conversion becomes more difficult, then a shop accepting crypto is now more attractive to those that have it. Of course that only works if the whole crypto hassle is still better than working with local banks.
  • xii23 4y ago
    > Argentinians do that coz Argentinian banks cannot be trusted Incorrect. Argentinians do that because taxes are incredibly high, and if you earn in USD you must sell it at the official dollar rate (less than half of the real rate), and you can't even buy the dollars you sold back because there's a cap on how much USD you can buy per month (I think it's 200USD). Argentinian devs LOVE crypto because they love evading taxes (justifiably or not)
• throwaway290 4y ago
  > pays a lot of Argentinian developers in USDT And what do those developers pay for in USDT? It's Argentina. Read about its economy. To use it as an example is somewhat disingenuous. The government rations foreign currency in something like a few hundred USD per month per person I think. If cryptocurrency is another way to work around legal inconveniences, so what.
• xwolfi 4y ago
  Oh yes, Argentina, where the solution is unregulated crypto. Thank god swift is irrelevant to crypto because that's the core issue here.
  • monero-xmr 4y ago
    Well the solution certainly doesn’t involve the government considering a century of destructive policies
    • lern_too_spel 4y ago
      Your problem is failing to understand that the Argentinian government can regulate crypto just as it regulates USD.
      • monero-xmr 4y ago
        All real estate in Argentina is sold via USD as hundred dollar notes in a brief case. Entire businesses exist to facilitate these transactions. I don’t think you understand what a basket case this country and its government is.
        • notch656c 4y ago
          I'm always baffled by people that think the way that laws are written must be the way things operate. Taxes in BA are above 100% of profits. On paper it's illegal to make money. Yet businesses exist. Some peoples' minds may explode.
          • lern_too_spel 4y ago
            And I'm always baffled by people who fail to understand arguments. If a country can't regulate currency, USD is far superior to crypto. If a country can, neither works.
      • int_19h 4y ago
        The reason why they can enforce the regulations on USD is because you're either bringing physical cash across the border - which can then be intercepted by the customs - or you're doing a wire transfer to some local bank, which said bank will then duly report to the government. They can certainly pass equivalent regulations on BTC. Good luck enforcing them, though.
• homeland221 4y ago
  Argentina only. I worked in super multi congloromerates HR. USD is near 100%. We avoided South America because unstability and persistent high inflation. We do have other South American working in different regions (yes, including those from IT/AI you name it). They all being paid with USD or their residence currency. When I was in another company, small one, we did paid with baseball cards too (I doubt anyone willing to consider that as usual payments)
  • elkos 4y ago
    Baseball cards? You really need to do a write up about it this sounds pretty interesting.
• throw123123123 4y ago
  If argentinian developers are reading this, you are probably better off making a bank account in the US than using crypto. Please refrain from transferring large amounts to local crypto companies, as those transfers are tracked and can be used against you in the future.
• throw123123123 4y ago
  Which company is this?
• trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  The reason Argentinians want to get paid in this and not their local currency is economic instability and high inflation in Argentina. You don't want to be holding Pesos, it's madness. The situation is similarly dire in quite a few other countries. Turkey, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon,... I'm not sure about Argentina specifically but from most of these cases I know personally they don't even use Binance for conversion, there are local money changers that trade hard currency for depreciating (t)rash, this was true even before Bitcoin & co when people still kept paper dollars under their mattress or in the bank. Those who think this will go away with regulation and bans are even more delusional than the folks who thought that alcohol or drugs can simply be banned and all will be fine. Financial security is a basic need, it's part of our drive for survival. Binance is mostly used by speculators/retail traders, not people who actually use cryptocurrencies. I get the joke that Bitcoin people say everything's good for Bitcoin, but in this case it may actually be true. Binance isn't a good company and people have been concerned about their huge market share in exchanges for a long time. Binance isn't pro Bitcoin, Ethereum and other such networks. They heavily push their own coins and solutions which aren't decentralized. It's only slightly better for the ecosystem then FTX probably, in the sense that they're not outright stealing user funds - at least that we know of.
  • dogma1138 4y ago
    I’m sure tax avoidance if not full on evasion has nothing to do with it…