Gotta love how the negative crypto articles rise to the top on HN immediately. What's not understood is that crypto is a way for the un-banked (1/3 of the people on earth who barely have clean water, toilets or telephones, yes telephones and that make $1/day) now have access and participation in a global trading platform. Disruption for the first time is happening to both VCs and traditional investment bankers and they are rekt. Be a contrarian.
back
5 comments
Except that bitcoin transaction cost is what, $10 or $15 now? There's no way "unbanked" people will benefit from that, at all.
Yes. For right now, the demand for transactions is greatly outstripping the fixed supply of transactions that the network can provide. Nobody has convincingly solved the problem (IOTA, I'm looking at you...). Altcoins don't have this problem yet either because they are not as widely used and those that can do more transactions per second have blockchains that would be growing very quickly in size if the blocks were close to full.
None of the current globally distributed trustless ledgers cannot support a huge number of transactions per second. We will need new technologies, possibly on top of bitcoin, or through new technology.
There have been low transaction fees in the past and they can return. Currently that is not the case.
He wrote crypto, not bitcoin.
Yet the economists they're mocking were asked about bitcoin.
Good point.
The unbanked have absolutely no use for a volatile pseudo-currency with transaction costs >$20
Ever heard of other crypto?
How are these people without basic necessities accessing their coins, exactly? It's hard to trade Internet Fun Bucks without Internet access.
I would be more willing to believe this if among many other things bitcoin price didn't rise so much. As it is, it is clearly mostly bought and not "traded" which suggest it is used as a store of value (or investment) and not currency.
It might be that cryptocoins will perform that role some time in the future, but this is not what is happening now.
Barely have toilets and telephones, yet unfettered access to the internet and Bitcoin exchanges?
Where are you from?