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Volatility and exchange with fiat are the main issues. In terms of simply effecting a payment Bitcoin has worked since launch (aside from a few times when tran

by retrac 5y ago

Volatility and exchange with fiat are the main issues. In terms of simply effecting a payment Bitcoin has worked since launch (aside from a few times when transaction fees got pretty silly). The scaling problem can at least temporarily gotten around with multiple currencies. (Which seems to have been adopted in practice when Bitcoin hit its txn soft cap a while back.) IMO here in Canada it's near-feasible. Most people can purchase Bitcoin near-immediately with a bank transfer. Slightly more complicated than linking your PayPal account to your bank.

_fat_santa 5y ago
Open Question. Why don't more places accept stablecoin like USDC and USDT? The number of places that accept crypto is exceedingly low but even those that do usually only accept BTC. I wonder why stablecoins aren't used more for these sorts of transactions? Is it just that BTC is the most well known? Or are the underlying technical differences that prevent that from happening.
- retrac 5y ago
  Most places which accept Bitcoin don't plan on holding it as cryptocurrency; it's converted quickly to USD (or whatever). They would do the same with ETH or USDC, convert directly to USD, or Bitcoin then USD. In short most USDC purchases would probably be fiat -> ETH -> USDC -> ETH -> fiat anyway. But fiat -> BTC -> fiat is a more established channel, and with lower txn fees at the moment.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The root of money as a medium of exchange is trust. Most people don't even know what USDC or USDT are, so there's no trust there. Among those who do, there's concern that they're too unproven; there may be not-yet-identified attack vectors on the stack of technologies they depend upon that could some day allow one attacker to crash the coin. BTC has withstood a test of time that lets people who can't walk all the way through the implementation details to sanity-check them for themselves trust it. Money is a lot more like a social network than a standalone technology.

by retrac 5y ago

_fat_santa 5y ago

Open Question. Why don't more places accept stablecoin like USDC and USDT? The number of places that accept crypto is exceedingly low but even those that do usually only accept BTC. I wonder why stablecoins aren't used more for these sorts of transactions? Is it just that BTC is the most well known? Or are the underlying technical differences that prevent that from happening.

retrac 5y ago
Most places which accept Bitcoin don't plan on holding it as cryptocurrency; it's converted quickly to USD (or whatever). They would do the same with ETH or USDC, convert directly to USD, or Bitcoin then USD. In short most USDC purchases would probably be fiat -> ETH -> USDC -> ETH -> fiat anyway. But fiat -> BTC -> fiat is a more established channel, and with lower txn fees at the moment.
shadowgovt 5y ago
The root of money as a medium of exchange is trust. Most people don't even know what USDC or USDT are, so there's no trust there. Among those who do, there's concern that they're too unproven; there may be not-yet-identified attack vectors on the stack of technologies they depend upon that could some day allow one attacker to crash the coin. BTC has withstood a test of time that lets people who can't walk all the way through the implementation details to sanity-check them for themselves trust it. Money is a lot more like a social network than a standalone technology.