I'm honestly curious about this thing I see occasionally on HackerNews. The observation of the thing are mostly negative comments, irrational in nature, which are presented by a significantly aged account with very low karma and posting history.
Servicing the underbanked is an important goal. I know people working on solving underbanked issues and I know it is important to them and support them.
In this case, your comment is a completely blatant blaming statement. Just because less than traditional marketplaces share a similarity to this product, or the other way around, is no indication it's intended use is a darknet market replacement. In other words, the developers intent here is unlikely to be what you claim, simply by way of a biased comparison. The outcome of use by users may be different certainly, but that doesn't make your claim valid, or rational.
In fact, the only group who would be mostly likely to make this claim would be a group who seeks to control markets. If such a group sought to control markets, by manipulation of sentiment and social logic (of which is required for discussing said post) then a highly rational thing to do would be to create a lot of accounts over a long period of time and then use those accounts randomly to post negative sentiment about things that remove control from the group.
Further, I present an observation that by not knowing who it is that is posting, we (the HackerNews group) are doing ourselves a disservice in letting these individuals have an equal voice, especially when it is a voice of blame. That is not to say that entities should be denied posting when new, but perhaps those entities should be required to engage in positive additions to the discussion before being able to be blaming, as I am doing here, clearly. Of course, I have the karma to do so and a long history of comments that can be inspected to verify identity.
That's a good use-case for cryptocurrencies, and text messaging, if there ever was one. I'd like to see a project, similar to HN be developed which implements this using similar techniques to eliminate the increasing inclusion of irrational arguments into the discussion.
What makes you so sure that cryptocurrency brings anything to the table that the underbanked would want? Particularly since M-Pesa is changing the world (in some countries) without it?
I agree it is worth exploring, but we need to treat this as an open question. Easy conversion to/from other currencies at stable rates may be more important to most users than the theoretical benefits of decentralization.
I think the most obvious use (hypothetically, not proven) is in countries that have seriously unstable currencies or controls on foreign exchange that the user is avoiding. "Darknet" doesn't seem like all that bad a way to refer to these use cases, so I'd say the gp is unsubtle and perhaps dismissive but not irrational.
> What makes you so sure that cryptocurrency brings anything to the table that the underbanked would want?
What makes you ask leading questions which cast my comments into a blaming statement that I think cryptocurrencies bring anything to improving the underbanked's situation or experience? This is what is called speaking for others. I intensely dislike people speaking for me.
As a matter of my own truth on this subject, I actually have no opinion on whether the application of cryptocurrencies is a good one or not to this problem, given I'm not underbanked or in a 3rd world country dealing with the challenges of moving money around in less than trustworthy environments. Further, I have no second hand knowledge of the problem myself.
What I do know is that there are a LOT of underbanked people, there are people working on this, some of which I know, and that I support them in their efforts. Whether or not their efforts are good ones or not, I cannot speak to.
My point of commenting was primarily addressing the fact we can no longer trust random comments from accounts with little to no posting history, which insist on making blanket blaming statements that infer all new decentralized technologies are somehow linked, inexplicably, to crime.
