They will use crypto because it’s far more difficult to censor. The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth, but this is becoming a lot harder and will continue to be ever harder.
I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet.
And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.
> I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges.
You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine, and _any kind of so-called quasi-cash operations_ including buying cryptocurrencies or transferring money to exchanges. And paying salaries in anything but national currency is of course illegal. So tech-savvy folks could still try to find local who owns crypto and would sell it for cash, but for regular people crypto doesn't offer any respite.
A lot of poor countries with socialist / corrupt governments like Argentina rely extensively on informal money transmitter networks as well as money remittances. Exporters earn hard currency which is stolen by the central bank and converted into disgustingly inflated fiat, and then politically favorited importers get access to whatever hard currency hasn’t been looted outright by politicians. Small people have to get dollars other ways.
Stablecoins are acquired in less-authoritarian countries and then sent to people in Argentina and other socialist / corrupt countries. They then circulate among the people just like paper dollars do. As this black market grows it is very difficult to shut it down.
Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely the socialists try to adapt to this new world rather than shut down the internet. It will be interesting to see what new theft they come up with.
Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:
If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.
It’s a bit of a leap to go from “sure we steal your money and everyone is poor” to “hey we are going back 20 years and stopping all communication”. I think it’s a bridge too far outside of North Korea. Even China has a die hard and widespread crypto base despite their “banning” of exchanges and their great firewall. I worked previously on tech to get around it (rapidly cycling domains that are registered often and flip when the neutral list blocks a domain temporarily) and that was so normal people didn’t have to get one of the easy-to-find VPNs.
If crypto skeptics on HN were right then crypto would have died during one of the prior busts like beanie babies did. But it has an ideology underpinning it (Austrian economics and individual freedom) that keeps it growing.
While there are many who get in for a quick flip there is a large, possibly the majority, who see it as a movement rather than a get quick rich scam. This is why it doesn’t die.
It's partially the ideology but also the fact that as a very weak fiat currency everyone who bought in early has no way to cash out unless they can convince other people to buy their tokens instead of something else. All of those VCs, early adopters, etc. have a massive financial incentive both to talk it up constantly and create pump-and-dump schemes around things like NFTs because the alternative is walking away from the money they initially spent. The sums in question will pay for a lot of promotion and human psychology tells us there will be plenty of people hoping they can promote it back up to what they think it's worth based on paper profits they didn't realize in the past. I'd expect even more volatility as the major players quietly cash out.
I am friends with people with tens of millions of dollars in crypto and they aren't cashing out. If you listened to people on HN none of them would have stuck by their investment. Crypto is a multi-generational project.
And some people like NFTs just like they enjoy baseball and Pokemon cards - it's for collecting, except they can also be used programmatically in software. NFTs are for entertainment.
I think you are just woefully misinformed and know essentially nothing about what is going on here, but the HN karma is pretty nice.
> The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth
Do you have evidence for that? While the Argentinian economy is struggling, and the government has defaulted in the past few years, I don’t know of widespread, illegal government theft of private citizens’ assets. The opposite seems true: they want people to get richer in exports, so they get more in taxes.
Is your argument that taxation is theft? They do need taxation in order not to default again.
And those people who circumvent the censorship are faithful in their tax reports?
No, they are not. They are abusing cryptocurrency (the correct term, no matter how often you use 'crypto') to commit tax fraud. Which makes the government even more inefficient as it already is.
