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rglullisyesterday at 11:04 PM1 replyview on HN

How is the view from your imaginary moral high horse?

Try this: you are a paralegal working with translating/notarizing documents from Spanish to English in Argentina. You have clients in the UK - a wine importer. You send an invoice for your work, it's circa GBP 500, about 1 million Argentinian Pesos.

Then, you tell them about the payment options:

- pay via SWIFT. will have a 30% surcharge to account for difference between the "official" exchange rate and the "black" one, and the fact that it takes at least 7 days to clear. Keep in mind that you live in a country facing 30%+ annual inflation rate.

- pay via cryptocurrency, which can be settled immediately, you can convert to Pesos faster and at a better rate than the official one.

Are you saying that the only correct moral action is to go through the banks?


Replies

cduzztoday at 12:22 AM

Sorry; one final edit:

What you're describing is "bank" where the financial organizations settle transactions using a private media ("the crypto"); but each individual is still dealing with "a bank". In "crypto" you trust "the math" and you don't need to worry about the counterparty absconding with the money. In your scenario, the Argentine service provider is in a position where they trust "the app" not "the math"

Banking is fine; I'm okay with banking. Crypto is also fine, if you're doing one of the 3-4 things "crypto" is good at (mostly crime, but whatever).

But what you're describing is "bank, with settlement not using SWIFT"

Anyhow; my original statement is:

Which shitcoin or shitcoin network is "cryptocurrency" ? Do you mean you're just pushing fiat through stable coins into an exchange? Is the exchange even converting from one cryptothing to another? Are you just asking the peer to shovel bits into a some shitcoin address? If you're just putting fiat into an "exchange" and then pulling fiat out, congratulations, you've invented a pretty ordinary financial service.

You're not describing an actual financial exchange; you're making up some vague situation.

You're probably also breaking some laws around paying taxes unless someone's going out of their way to actually report these activities.

Regardless, please be specific about "pay via cryptocurrency" otherwise you may as well say "pay via paypal" or "pay via putting dollars into a bank of america account I keep open since I was a student abroad."

"cryptocurrency" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see where there's some magic "crypto ledger" in your getting paid for a service. Just an internet service that promises to transmit money from one place to another.