Interesting read. A few days ago I stumbled over a twitter profile from a person who was seemingly living in one of those poor countries and was writing stuff like "the rich don't care about food for the poor" and "please send BNB to this address to help me living". Made me quite sad and makes me still think about it!
Unfortunately, twitter does not provide a history of tweets/profiles I have visited; I hope they add something like reddit. Would really like to revisit this account now.
So ... it was sus from the beginning, and you still had money in it? How does that compute?
It totally collapsed, but not a big deal, because you were smarter than others, so they took the loss in a zero-sum game ("who gets to take the remaining liquidity")?
Well the question has come up before, and since I also know people from all these countries. I have talked about insecure financial environments with them it is an interesting topic but not always ok to talk about. While I try not to bring up cryptos to normal people, I think it is telling that almost no one brings up crypto as a way to transfer money. People invested in bring it up but very seldom as a practical thing more as an investment.
As a caracan myself, it's actually "caraqueños" :)
Regarding the subject, it is indeed very popular. You can go to restaurants, car parts stores and clothing stores and find the Binance QR code prominently displayed.
And a LOT of freelancers working online have no way of receiving payments from abroad other than through Binance (verifying Paypal here because of currency controls). No one wants to receive the local currency.
I wouldn't say that you'll see grandmothers in the grocery store buying stuff with USDT, but it's definitely used.
I find it funny that people think these countries just ran up into this problem and they finally have a solution for it
Yeah they do use a "dollar denominated stable coin": dollar bills under the mattress. Or just pegging transaction to USD/EUR etc and doing the conversion at transaction time
BTC might be useful for transferring money, but compared to existing mechanisms (legal or kinda legal), maybe not so much
"stablecoins" are not decentralized. If you're going to trust a central issuing and custodial authority for a coin, do you even need crypto technology in the first place?
The stablecoin argument in failed states is always so funny... yes people in these countries want USD without the legal framework (of their own country and/or the US). It should be pretty clear to anyone that allowing a private and possibly criminal actor like Tether to fulfill this role isn't exactly viable in the long run. For starters when the US DoJ will finally get annoyed that USDT are used to evade international sanctions and launder billions of USD linked to large scale criminal networks, I believe a few people will learn about the ramification of the US extra-territorial jurisdiction. Good luck to your stash of USDT then.
Same with the "funding activists in repressive states" argument. Now you have a few centralized entities that can share data with the authorities. And they do, cf. Binance in Russia.
Ironically a CBDC from a powerful but non-cooperative state like China would probably be much safer for these people in Iran or Venezuela.
And I have always wondered about these stable-coins. Let's take these countries, who in there is willing to trade stable coins with exchange rate of near 1:1 to physical dollars?
There is a stark disconnect between valid crypto scenarios and where the money proportionally actually comes from, that the crypto proponents seem a little too happy to gloss over (who also ironically are the furthest away from being benefactors apart from speculation and speculative fiction) which to this day gives the community a weird cult vibe.
For different reasons: - easier & safer to store - much more stable than their countries own currency - not controlled by the regime
And they will likely keep using it, despite major crypto exchanges crashing down, or despite the unclear dangers of USDT.