Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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If someone is in a country with a collapsing local currency, they still have to transfer that money to a Bitcoin exchange before they can transfer the Bitcoin.

If the currency is collapsing, who’s going to trade Bitcoin for the collapsing currency? That’s the necessary first step in this process.

If I’m just trying to cross the border with Bitcoin in my mind wallet so I can convert it back to cash on the other side, why does it matter if 1 BTC is $10 or $10,000,000? It doesn’t, because moving money round-trip through a currency is a matched pair of buy and sell trades in a short period. Net zero, long term.

This narrative that Bitcoin is somehow going to save refugees from oppressive governments is possible, but deeply flawed in practice. Either way, it’s not a long term driver of demand.

Frankly, it’s far more likely that the dictators of such countries would use Bitcoin to flee the country with their citizen’s money and avoid prosecution than the other way around.

> If the currency is collapsing, who’s going to trade Bitcoin for the collapsing currency?

Well, you'd probably find someone wanting to trade Bitcoin for goods, and as part of the transaction, someone else would end up using local currencies to buy those goods.

... Of course, in the general case, you're probably more likely to find someone who wants to trade USD for those goods.

> Well, you'd probably find someone wanting to trade Bitcoin for goods

If your net worth is tied up in goods, assets, and other non-cash investments, you don't need Bitcoin to avoid currency inflation.

This is why you would speculatively buy Bitcoin and hold it long before that happened, at a time when people are happy to accept your fiat currency for Bitcoin. People learning from experience in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, would probably feel glad to put some fraction of savings into crypto just in case, knowing that the interim volatility risk of it sitting in crypto is a worthwhile price to pay to have a reserve money supply that does not need to pass back through their original fiat currency on the way to being spent (as precious metals, stocks, bonds, securities, options, etc. all would).

Ok, now lets say you did the Bitcoin thing and your assets are safe. You are still suffering from poor governance and Bitcoin isn't going to change that one bit.

You can take a bus to Colombia and actually buy food or medicine. You call that nothing, so fine, don’t but Bitcoin if that works for you. It’s surprising you don’t think others might possibly disagree.

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