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Comment by out_of_protocol | Hacker News Reader

you also need a bag and a plane/bus/etc ticket to give that heap of dollars to a desired seller. X bank dollar is not the same as USD, you can be locked out of your money quote easily. Plus all the other regular points if you want to buy or sell some crypto

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I keep hearing this narrative

> you can be locked out of your money quote easily.

But I am curious, do you have examples that show that this is really the corner case I should be worried about?

Google examples, there are a lot of very much different cases, sometimes wild ones. As example, whole country of Russia was locked out of all non-RUB assets in their banks (at this moment restrictions are partially lifted), in Belarus you need 10+ work days to take at most 10K USD and 3K EUR out of bank per month.

In bith cases we talk about international sanctions. So you are saying that one of crypto's advantages is, basically, illegal finance. Nice.

> international sanctions

Not really, in these cases banks themselves decided to not give away "their" money

That is indeed one of the main "innovations" of cryptocurrencies: the circumvention of rules and regulations. (Reminds me of Uber.)

The problem is, when discussing international sanctions, that most of the finance is probably illegal. The US bans, say, economic activity in Iran. Iran bans economic activity in the US. Now all the finance in both economies is illegal.

Something being illegal doesn't really say what can and cannot be done. Or what is a good idea. Or what is moral. It is a vague signpost and really only matters as far as things can be enforced.

Yes: https://www.yahoo.com/news/canada-says-freeze-bank-accounts-...

Canada would essentially lock down financial system access for members of an unpopular demonstration.

Sanctions are literally "your money no longer exists". Or it does, but we refuse to allow you to transact with it. Financial access is a hugely powerful diplomatic/political tool.

Certainly you can find cases of government overreach if you look hard enough but they aren't common. The USD is backed by faith in the US Government, and it would be financial suicide for the wealthy to destroy that faith by just randomly locking people out of their bank accounts.

Meanwhile people get "locked out" or just lose their crypto far more regularly. Lost passwords, crashed drives, hacked online wallets, rug pulls, crashing values, fake "pegs", misplaced decimals during transactions, etc. 20% if bitcoin is forever inaccessible, and that percent will only go up, never down.

The "you can be locked out of your fiat" cohort are the climate deniers of the financial world "If the earth is warming why was there a record low temperature somewhere yesterday?". "Your fiat isn't safe - just look how those donations to the truckers in Canada were reversed!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertibility_plan#Abandonmen...

Entire countries have had access to a currency completely pulled. Not just the US wants to use USD.

Plenty of people can lose access to their money, not just alleged domestic terrorists (and isn't alleged is a scary word?).

I'm certainly no expert on Argentina, but I'm talking about dollars backed by the US government, not pesos that the Argentine government was pretending were worth a dollar. I'm sure even when the hard peg was in effect it would have been impossible to actually convert the bulk of the pesos to dollars - I'm sure no foreign bank would cooperate. This was no different than some crypto coin pretending to be worth a dollar.

In Argentina and Uruguay, all the time, not a corner case.

"Corralito" is unfortunately a common use word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

Or you can back your "stablecoin" with dollars. For each coin issued put a dollar in a vault. There is no other asset on earth pegged to the dollar, so it is impossible to back it with anything other than dollars.

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