Tag Archives: cryptocurrency

Crypto Champagne WISHES and Caviar DREAMS: Bitcoin ATM Neighborhoods

(Imagen 4)

Crypto sounds glamorous, promising freedom. I’ve seen ads for crypto apps in which the ads feature yachts and other images of wealth.

Well, there are precious few yachts in the places where Bitcoin ATMs are usually located.

“More than 80% of the world’s bitcoin ATMs are found in the United States.

“And as noted in a Financial Times opinion piece Friday (Sept. 5), these ATMs appear to be clustered in Black, Latino and lower-income communities, similar to payday lenders and check-cashing operations.

“”Providers have denied targeting areas based on any racial profile,” writes Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “But the apparent disproportionate placement is increasingly being recognized as a cause for concern.””

Of course, people in the richer neighborhoods are less likely to use cash to buy Bitcoin, so perhaps these locations are expected.

What Happens if the Crypto Exchanges Fail?

Some people who aren’t relying on gold to get through a possible banking system failure or other catastrophic event are placing their trust in crypto. 

ISectors, April 25, 2023:

“Bitcoin can be sent and received anywhere in the world, as long as there is an internet connection. This could be useful in a scenario where traditional banking systems fail and access to financial services is limited.”

But an internet connection isn’t the only thing you need to trade crypto.

  • You also need a crypto exchange, or some other way to trade crypto. 
  • And if that crypto exchange is hacked or goes bankrupt, you may lose your crypto…and there’s no FDIC.

A self custodial hardware wallet sounds great…at first. All you have to do is take your hardware wallet and walk up to the dude in camouflage selling canned Spam and holding his own hardware wallet. OK. Now trade it. On your own. With no help from a peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform or a decentralized exchange. Google Gemini:

“Hardware wallets are primarily security devices, not trading platforms. They don’t have the functionality to directly swap one cryptocurrency for another….Directly exchanging crypto would require complex cryptographic operations and blockchain interactions, which are not typically handled by hardware wallets.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how to interact with the blockchain all by myself without help. And very few people do. And even those who know this stuff are mostly helpless if the internet is non-operational.

So if the banks fail and/or some other catastrophe takes place, don’t count on crypto to survive.

Frankly we do better when there’s NOT a catastrophic event, protections guard us from fraud, and the bad effects of a fake identity are minimized.

(Post-apocalyptic image from Google Gemini)