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Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

I hope this is not a revealing comment on who you are, because I read that as "you should hope to speculate on some asset to make money off of other people simply because they were wrong"

I'd much rather see a stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty than I would see it be a vehicle to take me from top 1% wealth in the world to a higher tier of top 1% wealth in the world.

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> I hope this is not a revealing comment on who you are

Get off your high horse. Literally the entire stock market is based on trying guess better than other people and make money off of other people's poor decisions.

> stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty

If cryptos were stable, no-one would be making any money "investing" in them.

(Genuine) Q: How exactly would that lift anyone out of poverty?

I'm not a fan of crypto, but having a stable currency that the local government can't inflate/manipulate for their own gain would go a long way in many developing countries.

Think about it this way, how much trade would the US have if our currency changed every 10-20 years and all of our old debt was effectively thrown out? How would people save to build a business? How secure would they feel investing in their own future?

> having a stable currency

The devil's in the detail: "stable" but vs what, exactly? Local prices? Local incomes? Gold? USD? SDRs[0]?

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/14...

Stable, to some degree, in all of those respects, since they are interdependent. Being stable with respect to any of the above indicates a degree of stability with respect to the rest. You can't be stable against gold without a degree of stability against USD, as USD/Gold is pretty stable, and arbitrage would close the gap. Likewise with local prices and income.

I'm not familiar with SDRs.

> USD/Gold is pretty stable

Umm, I'm not sure I can agree with that[0]

To be fair, it was fairly stable until about 2006. However the whole point of "being stable" is also to be stable in times of external stress. USD/Gold fails that one quite spectacularly.

[0] https://goldprice.org/charts/gold_30_year_o_x_usd.png

That's significantly less volatile than Yen/USD. Stability in currencies is pretty relative.

> see a stabilized crypto that could act as an amazing tool for people in poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty

Would you mind explaining to me, or linking to some resource you find convincing, how crypto would succeed in this goal? (or even which organisation or coin has this as a goal)

Step 1) Person in Malawi buys Bitcoin.

Step 2) ???

Step 3) Person's village experiences famine due to severe draught exacerbated by climate change driven by, among many other things, Bitcoin.

Step 4) ???

Help, I can't find the step where they lift themselves out of poverty.

Step 5) lift themselves out of poverty

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