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Comment by billytetrud | Hacker News Reader

CNBC loves to frame Bitcoin as evil. The headline is unbelievably disingenuous. Western union losing business to a better system is not bitcoin damaging western union in any way that anyone should be upset about. Just like when tesla comes out with a new car, the headlines don't read "teslas new car could cost ford $3 billion per year".

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I looked at it the exact opposite way. To me, the headline was flattering. It shows that Western Union sucks $400MM out of people while providing a service that is easily moved to cryptocurrency. I see it as a declarative win for Bitcoin by showing how it actually saved Salvadorians a lot of money.

Its also common knowledge that Western Union and their ilk have been exploiting and sucking dry people who live on the margins of our financial system. Any article that says they're loosing money to a competitor is fine by me.

Even as someone who hates the crypto hype, I have to say this time the crypto-win is legit.

A better (focusing on positives instead of negatives, but the media feeds off of negativity) headline would be "New Bitcoin wallets could save El Salvadorans $400M a year in Western Union fees"

You could even leave out the "in Western Union fees" and it would make for a smashing headline.

I guess you're right, the article is pretty pro bitcoin. Still an odd choice of headline if you ask me.

The person who writes the article often doesn't write the headline.

Seems like it's your bias filter doing that. I read it and my bias filter said "It's going to cost the company that's usually associated with 409/Nigerian scammers because they allow for untracable thefts, and otherwise overcharge migrants to send money back home? Good."

Hmm -- I just read the article, and it seems pretty pro-bitcoin to me ...

    "They have to take a bus to go to a physical location 
    to pick it up, and there are gangs that hang out 
    around those offices. They know what people are 
    going there for, and they basically rob them."

And

    “Remittances are one area where the status quo 
    in our legacy financial system is terrible"...

And

    ... Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the 
    Human Rights Foundation
    
    “That’s drop-dead stunning. It’s an 
    incredible humanitarian improvement.”

The story of the article, and the headline, seems to be: old-timey remittances are on the ropes; can't compete.

I guess you're right, the article is pretty pro bitcoin. Still an odd choice of headline if you ask me.

Likely because while writers typically suggest headlines, its the editors and the higher-ups in the food chain that will often slap their own one on the article.

And you think the 200 Chivo ATMs aren’t going to be criminal hotspots? Not saying that to be critical — solving that problem seems to be key for more countries than just El Salvador, and for electronic remittance beyond Bitcoin.

No, because unlike Western Union people don’t have to take out their whole balance at once. In fact they don’t have to take out anything, because they can use Chivo BTC to pay anywhere.

Criminal hotspots? How so? Are ATMs usually criminal hotspots? If you're thinking that bitcoin ATMs can help people launder money, you're mistaken.

What they're saying is that if staffed remittance locations have been locations for criminals to hang out and rob people, bitcoin ATMs surely will have the same issue.

Ah. Well as others have pointed out, its likely that people will need to go to atms less often (since they can send directly with their app) and that amounts handled at atms would be substantially lower (because when using the lightning network, there aren't incentives to send one large payment vs a number of small payments). So if that's the worry, bitcoin would probably improve that situation as well.

True, but that's only if you need to convert to hard cash/USD. If you can transact digitally then ATMs have less usage and associated risk.

In another time it might read "These new 'cars' could cost the horse business billions per year"

It did strike me as odd that the headline implied I should be shedding a tear for an entrenched middleman because they will make slightly less money for being an entrenched middleman.

first thing on my mind after reading the title: "good". Am I evil ?

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