6 ms·
Does it do anything useful yet?
by 7e 11mo ago
Does it do anything useful yet?
- octoberfranklin 11mo agoI buy stuff with it all the time. It is by far the easiest way to pay people who are in another country. Trying to use a bank account for that always seems to get thwarted by a bunch of "fraud alert" false alarms.
- candiddevmike 11mo agoThe hardest part of paying people who are in another country is taxes, IMO. Which I don't think crypto fixes.
- mulderc 11mo agoIs it? I pay people in other countries with normal credit cards all the time.
- octoberfranklin 11mo agoYou're assuming they have a visa/mastercard merchant account. Have you ever seen what it takes to get one? Definitely not easy. Or cheap (fees).
- mulderc 11mo agoTrue but that also protects me if something goes wrong.
- themafia 11mo agoSo what "it does" might be "points out how terrible banking regulations have become."
- 7e 11mo agoMakes sense, as fraud is the default for crypto transactions.
- wiredpancake 11mo ago[dead]
- jazzyjackson 11mo agoDoes fiat? Is a means of exchange, it doesn't have to produce value, there's T-bills for that
- m-hodges 11mo agoT-bills produce yield.
- eYrKEC2 11mo agoFiat does better than 7 transactions per second.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoSo does literally everything other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a first draft that decided to freeze development in beta. There are much better technologies out there.
- dpark 11mo agoWhat alternatives actually scale to the level that they could seriously replace fiat currency? I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info. Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
- idiotsecant 11mo agoI don't know what you mean by replace fiat currency, exactly, but that wasn't the post I was replying to. parent post eluded to BTC's famously extremely low throughput rate. All I was saying is that this low throughput is not a feature of crypto, it's a feature of the very bad design of Bitcoin that was never improved. This is to be expected- BTC was a basically brand new thing and nobody expected that it would ever be in a position that it needed to provide visa-level throughput. It's problem is that the Bitcoin development community is allergic to improvement in a way that, for example, Ethereum is not. Ethereum never would have existed if the BTC community was open to developing the protocol. RE: Other crypto with proper consensus mechanisms that have better throughput: ETH's L2 ecosystem is reasonably fast - something like 19000 TPS sustained was achieved recently, with an average around 10000 TPS and an instantaneous peak of around 24000. This is just an organic number - it certainly could go much higher, there just isn't demand for those transactions right now. It's hard to say how fast it could go. RE: your last point, Solana is junk - it abandons proper consensus mechanism in favor of throughput. It's subject to all the same problems that delegated POS systems have because that's what it is.
- soared 11mo agoReal answer: yes. Enterprise customers need to move funds between countries and using existing rails is slow and very expensive (fx, fees, etc). https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-collect-payments-170027463.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-colle...
- delfinom 11mo agoI have never had crypto transactions which weren't eaten up by both gas fees and exchange fees.
- Karrot_Kream 11mo agoThen you're doing it wrong? Solana has low fees. Lighting on Bitcoin has low fees. L2s on Ethereum have low fees. Curious when you did these transactions on what chain?
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo agoYour linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto. Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
- Esophagus4 11mo agoWhile it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption. > monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1] And $9T in annual payment volume[2]. As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B. I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not. [1] https://beincrypto.com/stablecoin-payments-surge-real-world-use-case/ https://beincrypto.com/stablecoin-payments-surge-real-world-... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2025/11/16/stablecoins-and-blockchain-becoming-the-backbone-of-finance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2025/11/16/stablecoin...
- bix6 11mo agoSquare just rolled out lightning l2 payments so that seems useful
- arthurcolle 11mo agoGoldman did a gold <---> painting swap via ETH like 12 years ago. The ship has sailed. It's okay, you don't have to like the calculator code as a DLL to use the calculator
- Karrot_Kream 11mo agoRemote uses Stripe's Tempo chain [1] to offer USDC payments to remote workers. Revolut seems to use Stablecoins also in their Fintech products [2], though I'm not sure exactly where or how. Western Union launched [3] their own stablecoin. One I am familiar with is Polymarket, a big prediction market, who uses USDC on Polygon [4] to denominate their bets and to post bids and asks. [1]: https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/remote-and-stripe-offer-stablecoin-payments-for-contract-workers/ https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/remote-and-stripe... [2]: https://www.bastion.com/blog/the-state-of-stablecoins-March-2025 https://www.bastion.com/blog/the-state-of-stablecoins-March-... [3]: https://ir.westernunion.com/news/archived-press-releases/press-release-details/2025/Western-Union-Announces-USDPT-Stablecoin-on-Solana-and-Digital-Asset-Network/default.aspx https://ir.westernunion.com/news/archived-press-releases/pre... [4]: https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/get-started/how-to-deposit https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/get-started/how...
- rich_sasha 11mo agoThese are all real uses, but also they are purely a regulatory arbitrage. Firms that are not allowed to deal with dollars instead deal Pokémon cards worth a dollar. I'm not dissing it, fine, it's a real business, and maybe honest too. And indeed crypto is easier to send internationally, though overall presents more friction to the average user with access to high quality banking as an alternative. I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application). Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. It's all fine if they are all honest, prudent, and don't take excess risks, and no one pulls their money. If either of those goes away, it's going to be a disaster.
- Karrot_Kream 11mo ago> Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA. That's why interest in stablecoins is growing. The Genius Act mandates 1:1 backing of coins to treasuries or cash so the stablecoin custodians make money from treasuries and enjoy a risk free yield. > I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application). I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance. I've come to the conclusion that HN may have liked finance when it was populated by more startup folks but now that it's another tech forum, the average reader here doesn't really care for finance. Prediction Markets are a big cryptocurrency usecase. There's also novel financial instruments like perpetual futures (patio11 is gonna write a Bits about Money post about them if you're curious.) From the sovereign currency perspective of Bitcoin, to the privacy of ZCash and Monero, to the subdivisibility of assets on programmable chains like ETH, the novelty is in the finance. If you're not into fintech then yeah you'll find the usecases all boring. If you're curious about the tech there is a lot of interesting stuff around iterated consensus though.
- belZaah 11mo agoYes. It allows criminals to move significant amounts of money without much effort, intervention or tracking. The current ransomware issue is a direct consequence of the attackers being able to utilize a relatively safe and cheap payment channel. Without it, the endeavor makes no economic sense.
- emulatedmedia 11mo agoIt also helps people around the world to send and receive money that doesn't have the privilege to do so in a conventional way. It is easy claiming it is useless because you don't need it, when you have no limitations or in the best case you don't need to swallow fees that start from 30%