An irreversible permissionless way to send funds near-instantaneously to anyone anywhere in the world is pretty darn good at a lot of perfectly legal use cases. My personal favorite example is that I once used Bitcoin for an emergency so my (then-homeless) friend could receive cash in hands from a Bitcoin ATM, in a matter of less than 1 hour, on a Sunday, while I was vacationing remote. Nothing, and I truly mean it because we searched, nothing else would have worked that fast: try setting up a new Western Union/MoneyGram account online on a Sunday, and have it verified and activated... nope. Fun thing is my friend had never used Bitcoin before that day. Bitcoin ATMs are a very convenient gateway to "cash in hands", when needed.
Can do this for free in Canada with Interac as long as both parties have Canadian bank accounts. But for international transfer theres not a good solution AFAIK.
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
Wise (previously Transferwise) can do international transfer within seconds. If you're in Europe then payments between any bank in Europe take seconds (SEPA payments).
Wise wouldn't have worked as my friend was among the 10M American adults who are unbanked. Also I doubt him and I would have been able to do account setup on a Sunday, within 1 hour, which is the time it took us to do the transfer, despite this situation being his first time ever using Bitcoin.
I opened my Wise account in 20 minutes. The ID verification is all automated so it's really quick. I haven't heard of anyone who is unbanked before though, what would be a reason for that?
Interac wouldn't have worked even if him and I had been Canadians. My friend was unbanked due to past financial issues (which is also the reason he was homeless at the time.)
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
I have not used the online version but you could have just as easily walked into a western union and done the exact same thing for substantially less fees.
Nope. The closest Western Union/MoneyGram/similar services to me were hours away by car. Hence why we tried to do it online. We tried MoneyGram because my friend was banned from Western Union. But even MoneyGram wasn't possible quickly online.
I’m straining to see the relevance of that, especially since at one point in my life I was a member of that statistic.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
pretty sure the only time I ever used Moneygram I managed to send funds from my UK bank account without any MoneyGram account. Was a really easy way to get cash in a city that definitely didn't have Bitcoin ATMs
That's much closer to being true now than it was when bitcoin started getting popular, in no small part because it scared financial institutions into competing on convenience. But really, who says legality is the arbiter of greatness anyway? Are you really prepared to say that every illegal use of blockchain should never happen? I'm not.
> nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
I tend to think highly of most of the comments I see from you man, but you are quite confused about how this stuff works if you believe that the pay-to-play aspect of a cryptocurrency can be divorced from the blockchain used to track it. They are no more separable from one another than front is from back or up is from down.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
Blockchain is not a technology in the sense of being a better "how" for some existing problem. blockchain is before anything else, a social contract based on the premise that everything humans care about ('value') really does boil down to "voting with money," and thus requiries enforcement of such economic consensus through technology. It is sufficiently removed from expectations people normally have about how they relate to one another that it would require quite a revolution indeed to be adopted in the capacity in which it is intended to function as intended, that is, to become the ultimate source of truth for every transaction on Earth.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
No disagreement here, not a fan.* but so many arguments miss this point. the problems with blockchain are rooted in the why; the how is mostly a sideshow but admittedly much more expedient to criticize in comparison.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
It’s sad that blockchain went the way it did, because it’s probably a great technology when you don’t expect it to revolutionize the entire internet.