tl;dr KRB is by no means poised to succeed
No national cryptocurrency has been adopted by a country, even as a reserve currency. If they did, I would find it hard to trust any government to keep criminals from stealing the whole fund. Properly securing computer networks is very difficult. I believe it's easier to steal cryptocurrency from a wallet than it is to rob a bank. Moreover, if we're talking about a cryptonote fork being used as a national currency, the government wouldn't even be able to track down who stole the currency. Given that, regardless of how successful Karbowanec is, I believe
it will always remain an unofficial, underground currency.
Though I still find some reason to be bullish on Karbowanec. Bitcoin's block size debate has convinced me that altcoins have a valid purpose. I don't think the whole world should necessarily be putting every transaction all into one bloated blockchain. Instead, it makes sense to divide transactions into different ledgers. Humanity is already divided by nations, so conceptually it doesn't seem irrational to have national blockchains. Even as just a store of value, cryptocurrencies can resist inflation. Ukraine "inflation was at more than 12 percent last year (It hit 43 percent in 2015 thanks in part to devaluation)." [1] And almost half of Ukraine citizens have internet access, accounting for 19 million internet users. [2] High inflation and a large potential user-base suggests there is an opportunity for KRB to see some amount of real usage.
Still, no national cryptocurrency has been successful. The country of Nigeria has 86m internet users [2] and an inflation rate of 18%. [3] The African cryptocurrency "Kobocoin," named after the widely used coins in the country, has languished on coin exchanges for two years. The transaction volume suggests no one is using the currency despite the availability of mobile wallets. It might be because English is the predominant language there, so there's no motivation to use an untested crypto over Bitcoin.
The threat of a government outlawing cryptocurrency is real too. Turkey has 46m internet users and 10% currency inflation. But bitcoin exchanges were chased out when banks closed their accounts. [5] Turkey banned Paypal from operating in the country as well. Egypt has 30m internet users and 28% inflation.
No national altcoin has caught on in either country, even though they appear to be (subjectively) better candidates than Ukraine.1:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-06/ukraine-is-fighting-its-own-cold-war2:
http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/3:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/inflation-cpi4:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/turkey/inflation-cpi5:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-exchange-btcturk-terminates-operations-in-turkey-right-after-paypal6:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/egypt/inflation-cpiTrue, esp. bold out. PayPal is not present in Ukraine due to govt's obstacles. They are banning electronic money services already. Centralized ones so far. We might be banned or chased because
no any power would allow to take away from them the ability to create money and wealth our of thin air at the cost of the rest. That's the reason that no any independent currency will not be supported by government ever. But take into account enormous level of corruption in Ukraine, - for those guys untraceable cryptocurrency is preferable than one based on transparent blockchain - that's another opportunity for some level of support by officials when they find out how it works
- I'm joking but there's a grain of truth in every joke. The catastrophic economic situation might drive interest to stable and even deflating cryptocurrency as an escape from official currency with constant devaluation and inflation. Besides, our name is well know word with strong associations with money, more easy to adopt than foreign unfamiliar '***coins'. From the other hand, some people tend to value imported goods over local but we use imported tech
They can not ban as easily as centralized payment networks. For courts bitcoin or Karbo doesn't even exist yet (there are court sentences). We by no means do not want to fight with govt or substitute official currency as a whole, - we want to take our niche. The changes are small, but it is possible to become stable and used local currency with its own userbase, merchants, services and the whole ecosystem. It's hard work, requires a lot of effort, we aware, but so far we are doing well.
And still ukrainians proved they can admire, there are still chances we will have normal sane working laws, sane govt which won't ban cryptocurrencies
