Probably it's true that "cryptocurrency is often presented as the only solution to problems that are either already solved or that have obvious conventional alternatives," but I don't think my comment or the sentence you cited from it is an example of that.

That article says that TransferWise was going to offer service in Argentina. Looking at TransferWise's web site (now wise.com) they currently support converting money to Argentine pesos but not from Argentine pesos. So maybe if you're in Argentina and you have US dollars in your TransferWise account you can send them to someone else abroad.

But how do you get the dollars into the account in the first place? TransferWise doesn't seem to have a storefront in Argentina where you can walk in and deposit dollar bills. Their nearest office is in Brazil. Apparently to pay them you have to use the banking system.

But, as I've explained above, the Argentine banking system prohibits most people from buying any dollars at all, and the people who are allowed to buy dollars are limited to US$200 per month. It's easy enough to buy dollars on the black market, but there's no way to put those dollars into a bank account, and thus no way to send them to TransferWise.

So maybe that's why I know people who have successfully sent money out of Argentina with Bitcoin, and I think I know someone who has sent money into Argentina with TransferWise, but I've never heard of anybody successfully sending US$500 or more out of Argentina with TransferWise.

If it turns out that TransferWise actually does work for this at some point in the future, though, it would downgrade "sending US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means" from "basically impossible" to "a hundred times slower, expensive, and unavailable to the 51% of the country without a bank account". Cryptocurrency would go from being the only solution to just being the best solution.