Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

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> Does this hypothetical situation you describe exist anywhere outside of the hypothetical situation posited by a character in a Neal Stephenson novel?

That indeed is a bunch of real situations that have happened to me in 2014-2015 and some of that is still a thing. Check your privileges, sweet summer child.

Like seriously — for the first 30 years of my life it was outright illegal to have a bank account in a foreign country in my name. Not enforceable in practice, except I can’t make wires between two.

So 2014, fucking Russia is being Russia again, USD wired from foreign clients goes in... and is sold for UAH at government mandated rate. I sit in a third country, withdraw it through ATM. Guess what? It is converted back to USD at a market rate. Of course you can still bring cash or btc in and sell it at market rate plus some margin, but not 30 damn percent.

Sometimes it’s less dramatic and web interface of your bank doesn’t have regexp for IBAN format of destination country. Ridiculous but have happened as well, so I have proxied IBAN that starts with GB instead of UA and that always works.

This exact situation is happening now in Argentina. If someone sends you USD, they get converted to pesos at a ridiculously low rate. That's why most freelancers use crypto as a way to get their earnings.

Fair. I don't know much about this world.

But, like, the classic "society could collapse" fear-and-doubt, doom-and-gloom, grab-the-gold-and-the-burner-laptop-and-the-ammo argument can be used for just about anything.

Heck, even when society actually is collapsing, the argument isn't actually that great an argument!

I'm not even arguing that cryptocurrency couldn't have value in the scenario you describe. Just that genuine, specific, examples are more compelling than generalized scenarios. Generally speaking ; )

For example, all of the more specific examples folks talk about below (Argentina, etc).

Plus the parent poster made fair points, based on my limited knowledge, about accountability issues with cryptocurrency. And trust. Especially for nontechnical folk, and even for technical folk. Even (especially!) when society is collapsing, there's always someone out to scam you ...

For arguments sake, if someone is in the scenario you describe, what are good initial resources for a nontechnical person? For instance, should I use something like a coinbase wallet?

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/fdykz3/is...

Well, I haven’t really talked about collapse of society here. I guess it’s difficult to even define what it means precisely. I could imagine that Sarajevo siege and few years around 1991 in former USSR could qualify.

Then again people who I talked to in 2014, were still a bit in denial till the start of school year and only then left the area directly affected by war.

My point is simple — you take the ability to access banking system for granted, when it’s far from universal. It’s also not as unrestricted and interconnected as bitcoin or internet itself. Sometimes you have a bank and a card, but your ability to transact is restricted. It doesn’t always mean that you sit in the basement hiding from daily artillery strike or wandering post-nuclear desert on a cool bike.

For sure. And that makes sense.

I guess I was more pointing out that right now it seems highly scenario-specific whether or not cryptocurrency can help in the way you described.

Doesn't it depend on the amount of money you're dealing with, what you may or may not need to do with said money in the near-future, your own technical competence/facility, and perhaps even the current state of cryptocurrency itself?

The government doesn't have to collapse for BTC to be useful for this (indeed, if it did, it'd likely bring down the infrastructure that BTC runs on!).

You just need to be in a situation where the law prohibits, or somehow restricts or severely taxes, the money transfer itself, or the use of that money to procure something you need.

> Check your privileges, sweet summer child.

Please don't do this here. It is needlessly condescending and insulting..

It is, but maybe start telling op?

"Does this hypothetical situation you describe exist anywhere outside of the hypothetical situation posited by a character in a Neal Stephenson novel"

That's a legitimate question

I think they're arguing about tone, not accuracy.

Some people feel insulted when someone thinks that their real problems are imaginary, so a hostile reaction is understandable, I guess.

My bad. The comment I replied to was so tone-deaf, that I mistaken myself being on reddit.

Your 'real' situation contains fallacies. How is Russia involved in money transfers to Ukraine? UAH is hryvna. Ukraine has it's own currency since 1991. RUB is used in Russia.

Totally nothing happened in 2014 that involved Russia, da. Definitely not a war.

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