7 ms·

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example wher

by Kindra 2y ago

Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?

freedomben 2y ago
I used to pay my dish network bill with it before they stopped accepting it. I've also used it to send money to friends and family, and to donate to open source projects and other things. If the fees were lower I'd use it for plenty of other things too.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- listenallyall 2y ago
  > If the fees were lower Aye, there's the rub. With all due respect, why not Bitcoin Cash or some other coin? Bitcoin Cash is the exact same thing as Bitcoin - same protocol, same 21 million coin limit, same Satoshi whitepaper, same everything, except bigger blocks and thus, much lower fees. If you are using a coin as an actual currency, and not as a speculator, why stick with high-fee Bitcoin?
  - loophole27 2y ago
    Took a lot of scrolling to find a mention of Bitcoin Cash. I used to believe in Bitcoin in the beginning, but the high fees make it impractical to use as everyday currency. Bitcoin Cash is much closer to what I had hoped Bitcoin would become. It’s the same as Bitcoin, except that it ideologically split exactly for the reason that some people wanted it to behave more like an actual currency, while others invented the “digital gold” narrative.
notatoad 2y ago
does buying drugs count?
markasoftware 2y ago
The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins) for a very practical purpose other than speculation. Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  BTC cash has lower fees I believe, I wonder if it could actually work as a currency for day to day payments.
  - markasoftware 2y ago
    It can work as a day-to-day currency, but it compromises the decentralization that is key to Bitcoin's usefulness as a store of value: + By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast. + Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack. + Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk. And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.
    - listenallyall 2y ago
      Every Bitcoin Cash transaction is on the chain itself. Bitcoin is increasingly reliant on off-chain "Lightning" transactions. An extra few TB of data or majority of transactions not on the chain at all? I'll go with more data & transparency, thank you.
1970-01-01 2y ago
100% this. Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin. The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.
- GamerUncle 2y ago
  >The other punchline to the Gold joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more gold chests are simply lost to time. This is how insane that sounds
  - shash 2y ago
    That's because it's actually quite sane; relying on commodity backed currencies - especially those which are _finite_ leads to deflation. You see that with BTC, where the value keeps rising and you need more and more fractional denominations to make sense. With gold (and historically, more so silver), it was _very rarely_ used for actual trade because it ended up being like five gold coins == someone's entire life savings. It was always silver, copper and unit of account. Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation.
    - jpcom 2y ago
      Interesting take. Therefore they needed a bridge between the deflationary BTC and a low-inflationary day-to-day note. Is there an obvious fix, my liege?
    - TeaBrain 2y ago
      >Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation Inflation in the monetary supply, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange. Edit: I'd remembered wrong. It was silver, not gold, that Spain experienced an influx of.
qingcharles 2y ago
Is it even possible with BTC? I mean, how long does the transaction take to completely confirm? 30 mins? I guess if you paid way in advance; or loaded up a prepaid wallet.
- genem9 2y ago
  Lightning transactions are instant
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cturner 2y ago
Gresham's law says that "bad money drives out good". Due to the dynamic this describes, it is unlikely bitcoin would commonly be used to buy and sell things even if it did not suffer practical obstacles. Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management. As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to. You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it. Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value. But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Society needs at least some inflation for things to keep moving, but an individual usually wants the opposite. The elected government serves the society of its citizens, while inventors and holders of unofficial currencies are individuals who ultimately serve only themselves.
  - cturner 2y ago
    There is a legitimate role for both things: to have some non-inflationary things that serve as a store-of-value, and then some inflationary things to serve as regular currency. It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses. When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us. We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most. The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state. To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.
mhast 2y ago
There have been stores which accepted bitcoin as payment. Webhallen.com is an electronics store in Sweden which at least used to accept bitcoin (not sure if they still do). As a general rule it's not very convenient to do so though since the value can fluctuate. (Which naturally all currencies do, but it would be kind of like paying with USD in the EU. You could do that, but most stores are not interested in the extra hassle of keeping track of multiple currencies.) It is also not uncommon for services like VPN or IPTV streaming ("pirate streaming") providers to accept crypto.
gloosx 2y ago
If bitcoin utility is storing value outside of tax jurisdiction and moving it without obstruction, globally – then the question is Why should that even matter? Former is every rich person's dream, and latter enables a lot of things, good or bad. A counter-example: can you come up to a coffee shop with a gold collectible coin, chew a piece out, and use it to pay for your coffee directly? You need a proxy in form of a pawn shop for that. Instruments are instruments, if it is not used for every day business transactions doesn't mean it is not heavily ab-used inside it's niche

by Kindra 2y ago

freedomben 2y ago

I used to pay my dish network bill with it before they stopped accepting it. I've also used it to send money to friends and family, and to donate to open source projects and other things. If the fees were lower I'd use it for plenty of other things too.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
listenallyall 2y ago
> If the fees were lower Aye, there's the rub. With all due respect, why not Bitcoin Cash or some other coin? Bitcoin Cash is the exact same thing as Bitcoin - same protocol, same 21 million coin limit, same Satoshi whitepaper, same everything, except bigger blocks and thus, much lower fees. If you are using a coin as an actual currency, and not as a speculator, why stick with high-fee Bitcoin?
- loophole27 2y ago
  Took a lot of scrolling to find a mention of Bitcoin Cash. I used to believe in Bitcoin in the beginning, but the high fees make it impractical to use as everyday currency. Bitcoin Cash is much closer to what I had hoped Bitcoin would become. It’s the same as Bitcoin, except that it ideologically split exactly for the reason that some people wanted it to behave more like an actual currency, while others invented the “digital gold” narrative.

notatoad 2y ago

does buying drugs count?

markasoftware 2y ago

The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins) for a very practical purpose other than speculation. Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.

ekianjo 2y ago
BTC cash has lower fees I believe, I wonder if it could actually work as a currency for day to day payments.
- markasoftware 2y ago
  It can work as a day-to-day currency, but it compromises the decentralization that is key to Bitcoin's usefulness as a store of value: + By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast. + Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack. + Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk. And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    Every Bitcoin Cash transaction is on the chain itself. Bitcoin is increasingly reliant on off-chain "Lightning" transactions. An extra few TB of data or majority of transactions not on the chain at all? I'll go with more data & transparency, thank you.

1970-01-01 2y ago

100% this. Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin. The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.

GamerUncle 2y ago
>The other punchline to the Gold joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more gold chests are simply lost to time. This is how insane that sounds
- shash 2y ago
  That's because it's actually quite sane; relying on commodity backed currencies - especially those which are _finite_ leads to deflation. You see that with BTC, where the value keeps rising and you need more and more fractional denominations to make sense. With gold (and historically, more so silver), it was _very rarely_ used for actual trade because it ended up being like five gold coins == someone's entire life savings. It was always silver, copper and unit of account. Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation.
  - jpcom 2y ago
    Interesting take. Therefore they needed a bridge between the deflationary BTC and a low-inflationary day-to-day note. Is there an obvious fix, my liege?
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    >Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation Inflation in the monetary supply, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange. Edit: I'd remembered wrong. It was silver, not gold, that Spain experienced an influx of.

qingcharles 2y ago

Is it even possible with BTC? I mean, how long does the transaction take to completely confirm? 30 mins? I guess if you paid way in advance; or loaded up a prepaid wallet.

genem9 2y ago
Lightning transactions are instant

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cturner 2y ago

Gresham's law says that "bad money drives out good". Due to the dynamic this describes, it is unlikely bitcoin would commonly be used to buy and sell things even if it did not suffer practical obstacles. Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management. As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to. You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it. Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value. But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.

strogonoff 2y ago
Society needs at least some inflation for things to keep moving, but an individual usually wants the opposite. The elected government serves the society of its citizens, while inventors and holders of unofficial currencies are individuals who ultimately serve only themselves.
- cturner 2y ago
  There is a legitimate role for both things: to have some non-inflationary things that serve as a store-of-value, and then some inflationary things to serve as regular currency. It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses. When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us. We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most. The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state. To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.

mhast 2y ago

There have been stores which accepted bitcoin as payment. Webhallen.com is an electronics store in Sweden which at least used to accept bitcoin (not sure if they still do). As a general rule it's not very convenient to do so though since the value can fluctuate. (Which naturally all currencies do, but it would be kind of like paying with USD in the EU. You could do that, but most stores are not interested in the extra hassle of keeping track of multiple currencies.) It is also not uncommon for services like VPN or IPTV streaming ("pirate streaming") providers to accept crypto.

gloosx 2y ago

If bitcoin utility is storing value outside of tax jurisdiction and moving it without obstruction, globally – then the question is Why should that even matter? Former is every rich person's dream, and latter enables a lot of things, good or bad. A counter-example: can you come up to a coffee shop with a gold collectible coin, chew a piece out, and use it to pay for your coffee directly? You need a proxy in form of a pawn shop for that. Instruments are instruments, if it is not used for every day business transactions doesn't mean it is not heavily ab-used inside it's niche