Hacker News Reader

Isn't there really any service that lets you buy and use USD, EUR, GBP... online? And if not, would you still continue to buy crypto if one of these currencies was available?

View on HN

Of course there is! The banks provide this service. It's called "Home Banking" (yes, in English). As I said above, and as in most countries, it's heavily regulated by the government as described above—prohibited to the part of the population whose need for a form of savings is most desperate, and limited to US$200 a month—and everyone over 20 remembers when the government confiscated ⅔ of everybody's Argentine-bank USD savings. Something like half of Argentines have a bank account and about half of those (about a quarter of the total) are eligible to purchase dollars with it.

Bitcoin is so far not heavily regulated, but presumably will be. But it doesn't provide the scrumptious, juicy central point of control that the Banco Central de la República Argentina does; regardless of what the law says, there's no practical way to confiscate every Argentine's Bitcoin savings between sunset and sunrise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com