good piece about crypto in Argentina, read after an FC rec by @dwr yesterday: https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-market-cash

it’s worrying to learn about the layers of intermediaries here. some of what comes to mind:

good piece about crypto in Argentina, read after an FC rec by @dwr.eth yesterday: https://www.freethink.com/technology/crypto-argentina-black-market-cash

it’s worrying to learn about the layers of intermediaries here. some of what comes to mind:

Crypto does provide value propositions that don’t strictly rely on a user custodying their own funds. As demonstrated here, there’s an ability to exit local disfunction and plug into a global store of value/payment system. Users get these benefits even if through an intermediary.

But this has inherent vulnerabilities (the cuevas storing funds on Binance for instance), and structurally limits how integrated the end users become into the crypto economy

The problem is downstream of the key management problem (and the overall complexity of using crypto today — needing to setup a wallet, looking at a block explorer when transactions fail, etc etc).

But these problems have solutions, and one big part of the solution is smart contract wallets.

These allow us to store a key on the phone’s secure enclave, share backups keys with friends for social recovery, and even give keys to third party institutions for fraud detection and other purposes. We get security & convenience at the same time.

Account Abstraction goes further and bakes this idea of smart contract wallets into the blockchain protocol itself, making them the default.

(This is also why people like Pedro at WalletConnect and Julien at Argent have said that account abstraction might be the biggest blocker toward wider adoption of crypto)

There is path dependence & some urgency here: solutions that are adopted today due to the lack of better alternatives will have staying power. There are switching costs and network effects of various kinds that compound and make switching further down the line more difficult.

So it’s important to have a more compelling alternative in the security/usability tradeoff space, and to do this sooner rather than later.

I think this is happening because the current state of crypto/wallet infrastructure requires users to pick either security or convenience; and expecting someone to manage private keys is unreasonable (and proven to not happen at scale).