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It's difficult (but not impossible) to find niches where cryptocurrencies are being used as currencies. They are more often described and used by enthusiasts as

by giaour 4y ago

It's difficult (but not impossible) to find niches where cryptocurrencies are being used as currencies. They are more often described and used by enthusiasts as securities or investments, so it's this aspect that dominates discussion today. Outside of criminal activity (including "positive" criminal activity like evading the capital controls of authoritarian regimes), there's not much to recommend cryptocurrency as a currency. Bitcoin maximum throughout is several orders of magnitude too small to support meaningful use, and transaction fees on popular chains are punishingly high. I personally like to use payment instruments that can be clawed back in the case of fraud (like credit cards) for large purchases, so I can't really understand the appeal of an irreversible payment instrument for routine use.

zer01 4y ago
Anecdotally I’ve personally seen a lot of “Bitcoin accepted here” signs while traveling around America. It’s not ubiquitous, but it is there. Hell, I bought a plane ticket with Bitcoin way back in 2014 for a family member to come see me. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the “lightning network” but it uses some really clever cryptography which allows people to send/recv Bitcoin almost instantly, with finalized settlement done on-chain as a normal transaction when the payment channel closes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network The other thing about payment finality is that thanks to blockchains with smart contracts (so not really on Bitcoin) things like escrow become pretty simple to conduct. You can write programs to enforce exactly how an exchange should work (“only release payment after proof has been posted to the chain”), and both parties can have confidence that no one is getting taken advantage of because they’ve agreed to immutable rules beforehand - to me that’s a super powerful primitive to build neat stuff with.

by giaour 4y ago

zer01 4y ago

Anecdotally I’ve personally seen a lot of “Bitcoin accepted here” signs while traveling around America. It’s not ubiquitous, but it is there. Hell, I bought a plane ticket with Bitcoin way back in 2014 for a family member to come see me. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the “lightning network” but it uses some really clever cryptography which allows people to send/recv Bitcoin almost instantly, with finalized settlement done on-chain as a normal transaction when the payment channel closes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network The other thing about payment finality is that thanks to blockchains with smart contracts (so not really on Bitcoin) things like escrow become pretty simple to conduct. You can write programs to enforce exactly how an exchange should work (“only release payment after proof has been posted to the chain”), and both parties can have confidence that no one is getting taken advantage of because they’ve agreed to immutable rules beforehand - to me that’s a super powerful primitive to build neat stuff with.