It is not solving a pain point Turkey has. There are no capital controls, black money market, extreme inflation or extreme lack of trust - for Bitcoin to solve.<p>For that you must go to Argentina and Venezuela. Bitcoin is solving real societal problems there, by simply existing and working as it promises.<p><a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z434a3/can-bitcoin-still-thrive-in-argentina-without-price-controls-peso-dollar-mauricio-macri" rel="nofollow">https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z434a3/can-bitcoi...</a>
Economists distinguish between real and monetary problems. If the government controls a big chunk of the real economy and makes bad decisions -- directing too many resources, say, to last-century commodities like steel and aluminum (the US), or building ghost cities (China) -- the monetary system isn't going to undo that.<p>But suppose Turkey's problems were entirely monetary, so that an alternative currency really could fix them. That currency has to fulfill some requirements. It must be price-stable enough for people to be willing to hold onto it. It must be convenient enough for people to be willing to use it. It must be widely understood and popular enough (this is a bootrstap or "chicken and egg" problem) that one can expect to be able to buy what one needs, when one needs to, with it.<p>Bitcoin charges something like $4 per transaction lately, and they take on the order of a day to process. It's unstable, and it's confusing to most people.<p>Maybe someday, though.
Several people have snarkily pointed out that BTC lost more value than the lira this year. Cryptocurrencies are very risky which generally isn't beneficial to people who are also facing huge political risk.<p>Uncensorable <i>stable</i> cryptocurrency <i>might</i> benefit people in the developing world, but it's not clear such a thing is even possible.
For bitcoin to help:<p>1. Bitcoin would need to be more stable. No reason to think it couldn't drop more than Turkey's currency.<p>2. You'd have to predict that the lira was going to drop a fair amount of time before it did... (meanwhile take the risk of #1... and ho man has it been wild).<p>Neither of those are things and even if Bitcoin was say stable and predictable #2 means you'd have to have "the people" speculating about currency.... that's not something most people are good at.
From what I understand BTC transactions are slow and costly. For it to be useful for millions of small transactions requires a very different infrastructure. You have to remember that BTC mining and transaction verification is extremely energy intensive, something that a country like Turkey cannot afford.