Would you trust your money with a bank in China? It was only a year ago that people lost their savings and couldn’t withdraw money for food after a major bank was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the Evergrande scheme.
I guess you can call it questionable, but if I buy a VPN, I’m not going to pay with a credit card linked to my name. I use Monero. If I want to transfer money to my family in another country, crypto is faster, cheaper, and has no restrictions. I can’t even pay my student loans from my home country because my current bank blocks foreign credit card transactions, even if they are important.
This is very niche and not something an average Joe needs, but cryptocurrency isn’t for the average Joe to begin with.
See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there will be price swings a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.
Would you trust your money with a bank in China? It was only a year ago that people lost their savings and couldn’t withdraw money for food after a major bank was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the Evergrande scheme.
I guess you can call it questionable, but if I buy a VPN, I’m not going to pay with a credit card linked to my name. I use Monero. If I want to transfer money to my family in another country, crypto is faster, cheaper, and has no restrictions. I can’t even pay my student loans from my home country because my current bank blocks foreign credit card transactions, even if they are important.
This is very niche and not something an average Joe needs, but cryptocurrency isn’t for the average Joe to begin with.
See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there will be price swings a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.