I agree that accepting it as a currency means early stakers get more money which is less than ideal. Same can be said about startups, the ones that are earliest in the building of company get most of the money. Most of the time, the founders and VC's are the ones that get most of the money with the other employees getting next to nothing.
This perspective is hyper focused on the US. There are countries (Venezuela, Lebanon) who's currencies have hyper inflated to the point where citizens have lost the wealth they've accumulated over their lifetimes. Cryptocurrencies allow them to sell their services/labour to a global market and to retain some of that wealth instead of having their local monthly wages be worth a fraction of the value that they earned.
The Venezuela/Lebanon/Afghanistan fantasy stories are mostly canards. For the majority of people, and especially those in developing countries with unstable economies, there’s no “global market” for their services or labor. How exactly does someone cooking in a restaurant or sewing t-shirts in a sweatshop sell their labor on the “global market?” They can’t. They are stuck getting their “local monthly wages” in whatever currency their employer pays them with.
For the relatively tiny portion of people who have significant assets to protect, or who can sell their services globally, hard currencies such as dollars and Euros already protect them from hyperinflation and mismanagement of their local currency. Do you suppose the very wealthy in Venezuela have bank accounts in the US or Switzerland, or do they buy crypto?
Dollars and other hard currencies are already used in exactly the role you describe for crypto. Hard currency trading is often underground, black market, because of currency and exchange controls imposed by the dysfunctional government. A government that can ban legal trading in dollars can just as easily ban crypto (in fact that has happened in China already). That won’t stop the trade, it just drives it underground. Anyone who has traveled in a poor country knows that it’s very easy to use dollars or Euros.
For people in Venezuela et al. crypto is not offering some new magical lifeline to protect people from hyperinflation. It’s used to circumvent currency controls, and it will work in that respect until the oppressive government figures out how to stop it, driving it underground just like trading in dollars or Euros or gold.
If the anti-crypto perspective is “hyper focused on the US,” the pro-crypto perspective is even more hyper-focused on a small clique of (relatively) wealthy people in developed economies, free of hyperinflation and draconian currency controls and regulation, who have skills they can sell globally online — even if those “skills” amount to shilling crypto on YouTube to an audience of rubes who want to get rich quick and don’t understand risk or how blockchains work.
One thing that I've noticed is when the comments for a Launch HN or Show HN is overwhelmingly negative, that usually the product captures a usecase that people have wanted or hacked together themselves but haven't productionized or monetized. Sometimes, it works out and sometimes it doesn't but it definitely makes me want to judge for myself.
Watched the video and the product looks great! I'll definitely give it a spin and congrats to everyone @ SigmaOS for a great launch.
Hey all! Built out a passion project app to help podcasters find new listeners.
Each podcaster is given a channel with a public facing website for their podcast. To give prospective listeners a taste of an episode, post an audio clip with a key moment (has to be less than 5 minutes long). We take these clips and serve them in a feed of posts for listeners.
Hey all! Built out a passion project app to help podcasters find new listeners.
Each podcaster is given a channel with a public facing website for their podcast. To give prospective listeners a taste of an episode, post an audio clip with a key moment (has to be less than 5 minutes long). We take these clips and serve them in a feed of posts for listeners.
This perspective is hyper focused on the US. There are countries (Venezuela, Lebanon) who's currencies have hyper inflated to the point where citizens have lost the wealth they've accumulated over their lifetimes. Cryptocurrencies allow them to sell their services/labour to a global market and to retain some of that wealth instead of having their local monthly wages be worth a fraction of the value that they earned.