This is becoming a pretty rare position, so let me explain why:. Look at the graph of countries that use crypto the most source :. Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? In any case, between banklessness and remittances eg from Vietnamese-Americans , Vietnam leads the world in crypto use.
Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework.
Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country.
I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures!
I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams. I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms.
