I experience this feeling on a regular basis, especially because I'm also someone who interacts and uses crypto on an almost daily basis. This week's frustration came about as I was trying to move money around from our Parkview Mountain House account in the US. We bank with US Bank and, for the record, the people in the Park City branch are absolutely lovely people.
But here's one of the things: US bank cannot interface with my mobile phone because I have a Canadian number. And because I live in Toronto, I'm also not able to download and use their mobile app. This means I cannot do rudimentary digital things like deposit a cheque (also known as checks in America). I'm constantly hamstrung and forced to do a lot of things in person. Is there really no simple solution to this?
In contrast to this, I own brandondonnelly.eth, which links to my personal Ethereum wallet. It'a also linked to my Farcaster account (Twitter-like social network), as well as many other onchain platforms and products. And it works, as expected, anywhere in the world.
If someone in Botswana would like to send me 0.001 ETH (~C$4) because they like what I write on this daily blog or they just want to buy me a morning coffee, they could easily do that by entering brandondonnelly.eth on their phone. They could also choose to do so with a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. And when I eventually do my income taxes and I review my wallet's ledger, this transfer would show up and I would be able to categorize it accordingly.
This, to me, is very clearly the future of the global economy.
Full disclosure: I am long ETH and companies like Coinbase.
Cover photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash.
If apps are geo restricted, one way to get around the fact that you can't download the US Bank app is to change your geo location in Apple Store. Once you change this setting in the app, you will be able to download the US Bank app.....making life a little easier.
Can't your Substack accept credit cards as payment? As someone who argues about the uselessness (and corruptability) of Cryptocurrency a lot due to my senior position in the Public Banking Institute (V.P.; AI Chair; NY Chapter President), I'd like to know if there is really a legitimate use case for Cryptocurrency. There are lots of illegitimate use cases for money laundering, fraud and tax evasion, etc. There's also large opportunities for theft of cryptocurrency, even violent theft as recently happened in NYC when someone was held hostage for 2 weeks while being beaten and tortured for his passkey. Incredibly, he didn't give it up and managed to escape, eventually.
I don't use Substack. This blog runs on a blockchain (Arweave). People can and do a collect posts through it and then I get a bit of ETH deposited into my wallet. So yes. There are many legitimate use cases and the underlying technology is powerful. Unfortunately, there will always be bad actors who try and take advantage.