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Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

You obviously have never suffered in a country with stringent exchange controls.

Are you stating that you actually have, or speculating that bitcoin must help such people?

Both. I do quite a bit of offshoring in Central and South America (and elsewhere). If I make payment to contractors in Colombia for example, the recipients have severe restrictions on spending that money outside their country if it is in USD or pesos. Hence crypto.

This does not even address the huge number of "unbanked" people in the US who have to pay a fortune in fees for their payments to family back "home" - crypto offers them a much cheaper alternative. They don't care what the crypto is worth as it gets spent again back "home" as a currency, not as an investment.

Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.

I'm just paying independent contractors with crypto. How could that possibly be illegal? What the contractor does with the crypto is not under my control.

But if you could pay them in USD or pesos, you would? Can't you see how the government would take an issue with that, the very same issue that they have with USD or pesos?

It is not me as the remitter that is regulated. It is the contractor receiving the payment that is restricted on what they do with it in their foreign country. My understanding is that most of the countries involved have severe restrictions on hard/fiat currency transfers but not (yet) on crypto currencies.

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